


a question of worth

by Deisderium



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes' Feelings of Inadequacy, Endgame Fixit of sorts, Found Family, M/M, Religious Cults, Reverse Time Heist, The Snap Taken More Seriously Than in Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25783057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deisderium/pseuds/Deisderium
Summary: Bucky can't explain to anyone how strange it is to wake up in Wakanda with five years gone in a blink, in a second. The last thing he remembers was trying to get to Steve, and then General Okoye is telling them—because it's not just Bucky, it's so many people—that five years have passed and the rest of the world went on without them.He should be used to it, he supposes, but he had really thought that he was done sliding through time, finished missing years. He had promised himself—had promised Steve—after that last time in Wakanda to get rid of the trigger words that it would be the last time, that he wouldn't leave like that again. He had thought it was a promise he could keep.~o~In which Steve and Bucky return the Infinity Stones, and return to a world drastically changed from the one Bucky left five years ago, and Bucky has to struggle with the knowledge that his best friend held Mjölnir, and at least briefly had the power of a god. So where does that leave an ex-brainwashed assassin?
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 173
Kudos: 375





	1. Returning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mambo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mambo/gifts).



> This has been sitting in my drafts for months, and when i looked at it, it really only needed a very little work at the end, so I am setting it free. Chapters will post every other day. :D 
> 
> This fic is the culmination of two thoughts: what would Bucky think about [Steve having channeled the power of a god when he held Mjolnir](https://twitter.com/deisderium/status/1225433811347017728), and a conversation with mambo on twitter about the kind of cults that might have sprung up during the Snap. Thank you for that conversation and many others, mambo; this one's for you.

**Part One: Returning**

Bucky can't explain to anyone how strange it is to wake up in Wakanda with five years gone in a blink, in a second. The last thing he remembers was trying to get to Steve, and then General Okoye is telling them—because it's not just Bucky, it's so many people—that five years have passed and the rest of the world went on without them.

He should be used to it, he supposes, but he had really thought that he was done sliding through time, finished missing years. He had promised himself—had promised Steve—after that last time in Wakanda to get rid of the trigger words that it would _be_ the last time, that he wouldn't leave like that again. He had thought it was a promise he could keep.

But there's no time to worry about that because Steve needs him; the Avengers need him. The big purple asshole is back, this time in Jersey, which somehow seems appropriate, and their whole team of wizards is opening portals for them to step through, and just like that, that easy, he's going to be with Steve again, fighting with him, watching his six; it's what Bucky has always been meant to do.

When he steps through the portal, there Steve is, and Bucky's mind shorts out a little bit because he studied up on the Avengers while he was in Wakanda and Steve was out fighting, to find out more about the team that Steve had built around himself, and Steve is holding Thor's hammer. Steve is wielding lightning.

Bucky knows what that means, and he always thought Steve was worthy of any accolade, but now there's proof for the world—for the universe—to see it. His heart swells to see it, a burst of pride that now anyone can look and see what Bucky has seen in Steve all along.

And then there's no time for pride, no time to process what this means for Steve or for him. There's only time to fight. Bucky has his guns and he has his knives, and he fights his way through the killing fields until he can have Steve's six. He doesn't remember everything—his doctors in Wakanda told him that he might never remember everything—but he remembers enough that watching Steve's back through his scope brings actual memories instead of just the sense memory of a gun in his hands. This sensation is not from his time as the Asset, this is from battlefields in Europe, and if it's grim work, it's still work that needs doing, and he wants to be the one to do it.

In the end, they're both still standing, he and Steve, and if Bucky has a lot of feelings about Stark not being there too, he'll have to work through those on his own. After the funeral, there's still work that needs doing. The Infinity Stones have to be returned to the timelines they came from. Steve says he'll do it, because of course he does, and Bucky won't let him go alone. The past might be another country, but it's one that's full of pain, and just because Steve has borne it alone in the past doesn't mean it has to be that way—not on Bucky's watch.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Steve murmurs. _As if,_ Bucky thinks. They each have a backpack of supplies to make their way easier, and Steve’s holding a briefcase that Shuri and Doctor Banner made, that holds the stones, each in its individual shielded case. 

“Try and stop me,” Bucky says. He’s still trying to take in all the changes Steve has gone through in the five years that he missed. There’s a tightness around his eyes, and new lines around his mouth, and Bucky can’t get the image of Steve touched by a god’s lightning out of his mind’s eye. He’s not letting him out of his sight.

Steve puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and the familiar grip sends a relieved shiver down Bucky’s spine. “There’s a lot to catch up on. The infrastructure problems, the cults—”

“All of that can wait,” Bucky says. 

And it's a good thing Bucky goes with him, because every stop seems like there's a scab waiting to be torn open. The Ancient One isn't so bad, except those old, old eyes look into Bucky's and he sees there the knowledge of all the things he's done. On Vormir, the fucking Red Skull is waiting for them, a harbinger of doom from both of their pasts. Bucky can't look at him without tears pricking his eyes, the remembered terror of thinking that that might happen to his face suddenly clawing at his throat. But he's there for Steve—he's there _with_ Steve—and the two of them stand shoulder to shoulder and the Red Skull only watches when they throw the Soul Stone back into the water. They don't ask for anything, but maybe both of them were wishing, because when the stone disappears beneath the purple waves, Natasha sits up in the shallows of the water, looking around in confusion. The two of them scramble down the cliff after that, the Red Skull ignored if not forgotten, because Natasha is _alive_. Bucky had gotten to know her, at least a little, in Wakanda; she was Steve's stalwart right hand when he couldn't be. They talked enough to know that they shared similar histories, had scars formed from some of the same pains.

She's standing in shin-deep water by the time they get to her, wobbly on her legs like a newborn foal. They're laughing and crying at the same time, arms wrapped around each other unselfconsciously, and Bucky can see in the way that Steve and Natasha look at each other that they've been each other's right hands in Bucky's missing years this time as well, and he's glad for it even while some part of him hurts that it wasn't him.

Natasha is still wearing her time suit, and they've got enough Pym particles to send her back, if not to take her with them.

"We'll be back before you know it," Steve says, smiling. Beaming, really, at the gift of her return.

"You won't even have time to miss us," Bucky offers quietly, and he knows there's not much to miss about him, but he thinks—he hopes—that given time they might be friends.

"I'll be expecting you." Natasha wipes her eyes, smiling as broadly as Steve is. "So don't dawdle."

They take the Mind Stone back after that, both heartened by the unexpected joy on Vormir, and find 2012 easy enough to slip into. The Mind Stone isn't in the scepter anymore, which is somewhat problematic, but frankly, Steve say—and Bucky agrees—SHIELD in 2012 is not who they want to have the stone or the scepter anyway.

Of course that leaves the problem of who they want to have the stone after all. It's hard to know who to trust when Bucky in this world is still trapped and Steve is only barely free, and everyone they might trust in the future is still trapped in spiderweb layers of lies. But after some impassioned discussion, they both agree that Natasha is perfect. She isn't yet the person that Steve leaned on so heavily in the future, but the seeds of that person are there, and who knows—maybe this sign of trust will help the part of her that's always thinking about what she owes, the debt she can never repay. Bucky understands that, only all too well.

And she's only just recovered Barton; and after his experience with Loki, she'll be careful with it.

They manage to corner her by herself in the Tower. The Avengers are still meeting, trying to figure out damage control when Loki has vanished with the Tesseract and the scepter is gone—also stolen by Loki, they believe, but in reality taken by Steve to the future. They’re in a conference room in the Tower, and Steve calls Natasha’s phone and asks her to come to Tony’s bar at the top of the Tower, the floor still smashed from the earlier fight with Loki.

She steps out of the elevator armed and ready for a fight. Her eyes go wide as she takes in Steve, her gaze darting around his face, taking in the changes that a dozen years have wrought between the man she just left talking with the other Avengers and the man standing in front of her. Bucky hangs back, both hands and arms safely covered by his time suit. He feels the urge to tuck his hand in his pocket anyway; he can never forget that he shot her.

But while she's doubtless aware of his every movement, most of her attention is focused on Steve. "It wasn't Loki, was it," she says, in a studiedly casual voice. “Who took the scepter from Rogers.”

"No, it wasn't," Steve agrees. Her wariness is plain in the way she holds herself, in the way she's taking in bits and pieces of information from his face and their suits. The contrast between this Natasha and the one they pulled from the waters at Vormir couldn't be clearer.

"Why would Loki make you older?" she says.

"He wouldn't." Steve spreads his hand wide, offering up himself, no weapons. "Time did that."

"You're from the future?"

"A future," Steve amends. "One that I hope won't come to pass."

Her eyes dart to Bucky, doubtless cataloguing every detail. But fortunately for him, he guesses, Hydra didn't often send him out without the mask, so she won't know his face.

"Who's this?"

"A friend," Steve says. 

Bucky rolls his eyes. "Someone else with red in his ledger," he says quietly. "A ghost who came in from the cold."

Natasha's hand twitches, like she wants to fire, but she pts away her firearm in the end. She just looks at him with a piercing gaze as though she could delve into his secrets. But she can’t—not here, not now.

"There's something we need you to keep for us," Steve says. "This doesn't go to SHIELD—SHIELD is compromised."

Natasha makes a strangled noise in her throat, the terrible sound of someone's belief being ripped away.

"You can trust Fury," Steve says, "and Hill, and the Avengers. But Alexander Pierce is Hydra, and he's got tendrils all through the organization." Natasha looks as close to screaming as Bucky's ever seen her, her face bloodless, that perfect mask of composure barely held in place.

"In our future," Steve goes on, "there are more aliens coming. They’re more like the Chitauri, and less like Thor. In our future, the Avengers were divided when Thanos came to collect the Infinity Stones. We belong together."

"The Infinity Stones." Natasha looks from one to the other of them like she's not sure she can trust her own eyes.

Steve pulls the Mind Stone out of his belt in the shielded container Shuri give them. He opens it, and some of that unearthly light leaks through. Natasha's eyes go wide.

"This was in the scepter that Loki used on Clint," Steve tells her. "This was what gave it its power."

"And you're giving it to me?" Natasha's face is controlled again, but she can't keep the incredulity from her voice.

"There's no one I would trust with it more," Steve tells her and Bucky is certain that, like him, Natasha can hear the deep sincerity in his voice. "Maybe you'll decide that the Avengers need to know about it. Maybe Thor will be able to help you with it, because he at least will have heard of the stones. But it's for you to decide."

"Why me?" she asks, her voice small.

"Because I know you." Steve puts the pouch with the stone in her hand, and closes her fingers around it. "And I believe in you. There’s no one I trust more in this timeline, and no one with your moral code."

Natasha gapes at him, her mouth dropping open. Bucky’s never seen her this thrown, and from the slight smile on his face, neither has Steve. 

"There are two children in Sokovia," Bucky says. Her mouth closes as her focus shifts to him. "Twins. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. In our timeline, Baron von Strucker used the power of the scepter to enhance their powers. With the scepter gone, I don't know what will happen to them, but they could use help, some kind of guidance so they don't offer themselves up to Hydra to be science experiments."

"And the other Infinity Stones," Steve says, "let me tell you about them and where they are." He keeps talking, but after a second, Bucky doesn't hear him. He feels eyes on him, hears a tiny sound just on the edge of hearing, and when he turns, there he is, standing in the elevator doorway, his eyes wide—Steve, but younger.

Steve without the burdens of the last dozen years. And yeah, this Steve has burdens and wounds of his own to carry, but Bucky is not one of them.

Bucky never beat this man to a pulp. Bucky never went into cryo against his wishes, never hid from him for two years. This Steve never saw the Winter Soldier's empty shell asking who either of them were. All the pains that Bucky has inflicted on the man at his side, whether he meant to or not, this Steve is completely free of.

Their eyes meet, and young Steve makes a sound like he's been punched. Steve and Natasha turn as one and Steve frowns.

"You tell Nat what she needs to know," Bucky says. "I'll talk to him."

Steve looks at him, the furrow between his eyebrows even deeper than it usually is. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, let me do this."

His Steve nods, and Bucky crosses the room to young Steve, who's looking at him with something between joy and terror. Bucky knows he must be cataloguing the differences between the man he remembers and the man in front of him now—the long hair, the beard, the lines that weren't scribed across his face the last time this Steve saw him; and of course there's the fact that he's alive at all, resurrected from what Steve must have thought was his unmarked grave in the Alps.

"It's really you," Steve breathes. He looks across the room to the other Steve, who is watching them closely, even while he's still talking to Natasha. "And that's…that's really me."

"It really is," Bucky says, and then because he can see that Steve is nearly vibrating out of his skin, he opens his arms. Steve falls into them like there's nothing in the world he wants more, and from what his Steve has said about this point of his life, Bucky suspects that it's true. He clings to Steve and lets Steve cling to him, their arms wrapped around each other. Steve clutches at his shoulders, and Bucky can tell the second that he notices one of the arms under his grip isn't flesh and blood because he tenses up.

"It's okay," Bucky says. "I went through some shit but I'm all right."

"I thought you were dead," Steve says. "I should've looked for you."

"I didn't die, but Hydra found me." Steve pushes back a little bit so he can look Bucky in the eye, but he doesn't let go of Bucky's arms and Bucky is grateful. His eyes are watery and red-rimmed, and Bucky is sure he's no better. It's hard to look at this young Steve and tell him these things. "I'm out there, somewhere, in this timeline. In a couple of years, Hydra is going to use me to attack you, but you can find me first."

"Did they—?" His hand tightens around Bucky's metal bicep, and he's grateful to Shuri for the sensors that let him feel it.

"Yeah, but that's not the worst of it. I'm—he's going to need your help when you find him."

"Anything, Buck, you know that."

Bucky makes himself take a deep breath. This is surprisingly hard to say to this Steve, who's suffered so much already, but not nearly as much as he could. "They brainwashed me. Turned me into a weapon for Hydra. I won't remember you, when you find me. I won't remember myself."

He hears an indrawn hiss of breath from across the room, and sees Natasha's eyes widen in understanding, her hand clenched around his Steve's arm. "The Winter Soldier," she says. His Steve leans in closer and starts murmuring to her, explaining, maybe.

"Ask Nat," Bucky says. "She knows what it's like." He glances back at his Steve. "He might not want help at first, but you'll be the only thing he remembers. And if you can get to Wakanda, the doctors there can really help." There's so much else he wants to say, but he doesn't want to overwhelm either young Steve or Natasha, although with Steve's memory, it doesn't matter if he understands it now, as long as he remembers it later.

Young Steve looks shaken by everything that Bucky has said—but why wouldn't he be? Bucky understood what it feels like to get your heart's desire but only in the way you never wanted it when Steve showed up to save him at that factory at Kreischberg, heartbeat steady as a metronome with lungs like a bellows, in the middle of the most horrific place that war had yet offered up to James Buchanan Barnes. He's never talked about it with his Steve, but he sees that same tension between a wish and a nightmare in young Steve's face; Bucky, back from the dead, but with everything that made him Bucky erased.

"It's okay," Bucky says to him in a near whisper, not that Steve at least won't be able to hear. "It'll be okay, Steve."

Steve takes a deep, shuddering breath, holding onto Bucky like he might fall over if he lets go. Bucky knows the feeling. He and his Steve have started hugging more, but at first he couldn't. He wanted to, but it just wasn't possible. His awareness of all the ways their bodies could be used to break each other was too honed, what he remembered of affection too piecemeal. It was only after he'd spent time in Wakanda that he'd been able to put his arms around Steve the way he thought Steve had always wanted. It was only after years of trauma and a lot of time in therapy in Wakanda that he'd been able to hug Steve when either or both of them wanted it. 

But he's glad he can now—glad he can give the human comfort of an embrace to this Steve, because even if everything goes as well as it possibly can, it will be years before the Bucky of this timeline, trapped in a vault somewhere and knowing nothing but violence, will be able to give him this; but at least this way, Steve will have the memory of it, know that the endpoint can be reached.

"There's a bank vault in DC where they kept me between missions." Bucky tells him the address. "A lot of the STRIKE teams are Hydra." He glances back at Natasha. "Rumlow. Rollins. Some of the others." 

Her mouth drops a little, just for a second, but then her chin firms. Bucky doesn't know how he'd have gotten through this if he didn't know that they had already pulled her out of the water at Vormir, and when he looks at his Steve, his expression makes Bucky think that he might be feeling the same way.

"Anything else you want to know—need to know, just ask" Bucky says softly.

Young Steve's eyes flick to old Steve and then back to Bucky. "You make it to okay, though, even if it takes a while. Right?"

"Yes," Bucky says. "I do, and you help me. I wouldn't have done it without you."

"Buck," his Steve says, but Bucky can't quite tear his gaze away from the Steve he never hurt. He makes himself turn his head, and Steve's eyes are as steadfast as they always are.

"We can tell you all the details," Bucky's Steve says.

"Yes," Natasha says, and gives a funny laugh. "There's no rush, is there?"

In the end, they're there for nearly a week, giving Steve and Natasha the information they need. They don't bring in the other Avengers, for reasons that Bucky doesn't entirely want to dive into. Steve doesn't want to, and that's enough for him. He's not sorry to miss out on meeting Tony Stark again, anyway. He would have liked to try to make amends to the man that existed in his own timeline, but he doesn't think he can bear another confrontation with Howard's son. 

Once, he takes young Steve aside—well, he takes young Steve aside many times; he both loves and can't stand the way that this timeline's Steve looks at him with so much hope in his eyes. He's told him everything he can remember about what his recovery was like. He's tried to explain how there was nothing in his mind except the missions, until Steve was there.

"He'll know you, but he won't know how or why, and there's so much of your history that he won't remember," Bucky has said to him.

But this time, he wants to tell him something else.

"You'll have to tell Tony," he begins and then has to stop and swallow hard against the swell of emotion that's stuck in his throat. "One of my missions, in the nineties…I killed his parents." Steve just watches Bucky with that bone-deep stillness that he can have, that steadfastness of both purpose and heart. Bucky makes himself take a deep breath. "You need to tell him, before you go looking to find…other me. He needs to have time to think it through, needs to know what was done to me, and that it wasn't my choice."

"He told me," young Steve says quietly, looking at Bucky's Steve. "He said the same thing." Young Steve takes a deep breath. "But you think if he has time to get used to the idea, it won't go that way this time."

"I never knew him, not the way you did. The only time we met, it didn't go well." Bucky wishes he had a better answer, but he doesn't.

Steve meets his gaze with eyes that are clear, but troubled. "Maybe it will be different this time."

"I hope so."

Young Steve never really seems to feel fully comfortable with his older counterpart, but he talks easily to Bucky, and to Natasha. Bucky can practically see the thread of friendship between the two of them getting stronger as he watches, and he smiles to see it, the two of them building the rapport that he's seen between their future selves. He knows his time is limited, but he wishes he could somehow stay to see the end of the story, the story that is his and Steve's but different. Better, he hopes.

"I'll take care of him," Natasha says quietly while the two Steves are conferring over some of the information and young Steve's possible plans about it.

"I know you will," Bucky says, and pulls up a smile for her. "You did in my time too."

She laughs, a quiet sound. He's pleased to have gotten it out of her. "Well, of course I'll help take care of Steve. But I was talking about you. Other you."

He feels touched. Honored—and really glad that his younger, broken self will have someone like her in his corner. "Thank you," he says.

They'll never see the end of this particular story, but he hopes it ends well, for all of them. Him and Steve, but her too.

When they've done all they can do, it's time to move on. They've given Steve and Natasha all the information they possibly could, and maybe more than they should have, but really, neither one of them has ever been the type to just sit and let a wrong go on when they have the chance to right it.

And they both still have wrongs to right, stones to return to their proper timelines.

It's hard to say goodbye to this Steve and this Natasha, but they do it. He can already see the burning purpose in Steve's eyes, the drive that has him antsy to move on and take action. And Natasha has her secret, the Mind Stone to guard. Bucky knows that she will keep it safe. It's with a clear conscience—but not without regret—that Bucky gets into his suit and gets ready for their next stop.

Bucky doesn't have a lot of memories of the seventies. All of the ones that he does have are of jungles and deserts, hot places. It's not so easy to break into a military base when you're not supposed to be there, but they didn't come unprepared. Steve has a backpack with two uniforms folded up inside it.

They change, hiding the time suits inside the backpack, and Bucky tucks his hair up underneath his hat. The uniform feels strange, rings faint memories in the back of his mind. It doesn't fit exactly like the one he wore in the war, but it's similar. He has to resist the urge to tilt his cover—he can always put his hair back up if it falls out, but they'd be in trouble if he does it in front of anyone else.

He and Steve navigate the base; or really, he just follows Steve, but that's nothing new. He's been following Steve all his life, and he'd follow him anywhere. Shuri was able to synthesize Pym particles based on the ones they had in 2023, so they don't need to go to the lab that Steve had told Bucky about. They don't see Howard Stark, and Bucky is relieved. He has no wish to dwell on what he can't change…unless he can change it.

But for the moment, he puts the thought out of his mind, and follows Steve.

"Where do we need to replace the stone?" Bucky says quietly. "We can't exactly put it back where the Tesseract was."

"No," Steve says. "I think it belongs in safer hands."

And then Bucky sees the name on the door, and he knows.

They push through the door into Agent Carter's office, and Bucky is so mad he could spit. He wonders how much Steve omitted from his little narrative about coming here the first time. How can he want to give the stone to her? It's not that Peggy wasn't incredible and incredibly trustworthy—in the nineteen-forties. But in the time since then, the time that the SSR are has been turning into SHIELD, she's had to make compromises that they know nothing about. It's not that Bucky doesn't trust her, but—well, he guesses he doesn't trust her. He doesn't know how involved she was in Operation Paperclip, doesn't know how dirty her hands have gotten, and more to the point, Steve doesn't either.

But then, Steve has always had the knack for seeing the best in people. The anger in his chest deflates. Steve sees the best in him, after all, and the terrible things that he's done are an ocean that could swallow whatever teardrops of sin Margaret Carter might carry.

"Are you sure?" Bucky says. It's much gentler than anything he might have said two minutes before, but Steve turns to look at him, one eyebrow raised.

"She's the only person I trust with it," Steve says, stubborn, like he's expecting Bucky to put up a fight.

"All right," Bucky says, exhausted by his own emotional response. Who else would they give it to, he guesses. The only people he knows of in the 1970s are the people who tortured him or the people he was sent to kill, so he's not exactly a source of good ideas himself. Besides, there's a look in Steve's eyes that Bucky can't quite interpret, and he's half afraid that the real reason Steve wants to see her is because there's been no one else like her. He's afraid that Steve wants the past more than the present—because when it comes down to it, Steve fought hard for him, but what did he get? A man full of broken memories and nightmares, not the friend that he fought for, not the person he remembered. And what Bucky wants—

Well. That's impossible.

"What are you gonna tell her?" Bucky says.

"To watch out for what she's building," Steve says quietly.

They can see her desk through the glass before they see the woman herself. There's a picture of Steve on one corner, and it makes Bucky smile, because it's Steve before the serum. It reminds him that whatever else she did with her life, she had the good taste to see who Steve Rogers was even before he got big.

On the other side of her desk are more framed pictures: Peggy in a white dress with a handsome man, Peggy with children at different ages, Peggy with, Bucky is suddenly shocked to recognize, some of the Howling Commandos, older now but still recognizable. It makes him happy to think of all these lives being lived, not stopped the way his and Steve's were. Steve is looking at the pictures too, and Bucky desperately wants to ask if he regrets, but at the same time, he doesn't want to know.

And then Peggy walks in, and Steve's breath audibly catches. She's older, of course, but then again, they are too. But she's passed through time the usual way, not sleeping or frozen in fits and starts. Her lipstick is still bright, but her face wears the years, and he sees both laughter and sorrow in the lines on her face. Her dark hair is still perfectly set, but now liberally threaded through with silver. She's beautiful, but she's not the same young woman he vaguely recalls. She's been forged in fires he can't imagine, transforming the SSR into SHIELD, and the more domestic flames of building a life.

Bucky tries not to sigh. He still doesn't like it, but he doesn't see who else they could give it to in this timeline.

Steve pulls out an envelope marked with Peggy's name, and the device Shuri made to hold the stone. "We'll wait till she steps out, then we can leave this on her desk."

"You don't want to talk to her about it? Like we did with Nat?" Bucky feels astonishment flood him, astonishment and—something else, something he's not quite ready to put a name to.

"No." Steve's gaze flickers over Bucky's face, then back down to the stone and the letter in his hand. "She told me, in the future, that she lived her life and I needed to live mine. You can see that she did, and there." He jerks his chin toward the desk with all its photographs. Then he smiles and taps the envelope again. It looks thick with paper. "I may have told her a thing or two to watch out for, but I don't see how talking to her here will do anything but bring us both pain."

Bucky takes a deep breath and tries to resettle himself. He looks at Steve and thinks, again, of the years he's missed. The years since Steve woke up, which he was still Hydra's asset, of course, but also the years that Thanos stole from them. Before, when he was recovering and Wakanda and Steve was visiting him every few weeks or months, he'd thought that they were getting to know each other again, rebuilding the friendship that once they'd had, that he remembered at least the most important parts of. They had been becoming close again, they had _been_ close again; but the man next to him—what this Steve is thinking, he couldn't begin to guess.

"Okay, Steve," he says, and while Steve watches Peggy, waiting for her to leave, Bucky watches Steve. If he's thinking of loss, if he's thinking of regrets, Bucky can't tell.

Eventually, a man comes to tell Peggy something and the two of them leave the room. Steve and Bucky slip in and leave the envelope and the stone on her desk. They wait until she comes back in and picks it up, so they can be certain that it's Peggy who got it, but they don't wait to watch her read it.

"Come on," Steve says softly. "Let's go."

~o~

After that, there's only one stone left to retrieve, and somehow Bucky thinks it will be the easiest, or at least, the least emotionally fraught. They have to take the stone back to Asgard, to Thor's home—before it was destroyed.

Bucky hasn't spent much time with the Asgardian—a literal god, if the information Bucky read about him is true. After his time as a super soldier—and hell, his time in Wakanda, where he'd seen things from the temple of Bast that made him terribly thoughtful—he's much less likely to discount the thought of gods that walk among men than he used to be. It still doesn't mean it's a comfortable thought.

"How are we going to return it?" Bucky asks Steve, more to keep his mind off his thoughts then because he's really burning for the knowledge. But Banner did say something about how this stone had been inside a person somehow, and Bucky wants no part of returning it that way. "Who do we give it to?"

"Thor's mother," Steve says, shooting a glance at Bucky. "He said she'll know what to do."

They were aiming for the coordinates of the Royal Palace, but where they actually show up is in a small, strange room with a tall, dark skinned, golden eyed man staring at them. "Steve Rogers," he says, "and Bucky Barnes, of Midgard." His gaze rests on the hammer that Steve is holding, pulled out of his bag of tricks now that they need it. 

"We're here to return a few things," Steve says, "I need to give them to Thor's mother."

"Of course," the man says. "My name is Heimdall. Follow me."

Bucky has seen a hell of a lot of things over the course of his life, but so many of them have been bound up in blood and suffering. For every wonder that he's seen, he's seen uncountable horrors, and it's only in the last few years that the former have outweighed the latter in any given week. But this—this is amazing, and while he doesn't doubt Asgard has its own share of brutality, right now all he can see is the rainbow bridge and the golden city in the distance, and all of it is beautiful. Bucky doesn't bother trying to pretend he's not rubbernecking like a hayseed in Times Square, craning his neck trying to take it all in and as he and Steve walk behind Heimdall. There's something new and something wondrous to take in in every inch his eyes fall upon.

"Steve," he whispers more than once, "look at this."

Steve might be older and more serious now, and the missing years might be another gap between them, but his eyes still crinkle up in a smile when Bucky calls him to look at something amazing, and he still turns to the sound of Bucky's voice, so Bucky makes even more of a point of telling Steve what exactly he finds beautiful, what exactly makes him gasp.

By the time Heimdall has taken them across the rainbow bridge, Bucky is more often than not just grabbing Steve's arm and pointing, to the smiles of their golden-eyed guide.

Heimdall walks them through the streets, ignoring the curious stares of Asgardians who watch them progress. But then again, Bucky supposes, they are used to far more interesting sights than two—what had Heimdall called them?—two Midgardians.

He takes them through streets that winds from side to side, none leading directly to the palace at the center of the city. Bucky approves of the defensibility, although he can't help but note that the streets are wide even if they do curve, and he could easily lead a team or two to strike at the heart of the city. He's resigned to that voice in his head by now, not so much a voice as a series of observations he's incapable of turning off, of how he would destroy things—a city, a palace, a life—if he needed to. He's more or less made his peace with it. General Okoye helped him, spending more time talking to him than he thought he deserved, but conversations with Steve—the Steve of five years ago, before the snap—had helped a lot too, and he tries not to hold it against himself that he has these thoughts. Heimdall shoots him the occasional shrewd glance as they walk, and Bucky would not be surprised if those golden eyes could see his thoughts like Wanda had been able to.

They get to the palace and Heimdall leaves them in an antechamber, telling them to wait until he brings Frigga to them. Steve's got Thor's hammer and the stone in his hands, and looking at them, Bucky would not be able to guess which weighs heavier on him.

The chamber in which they wait is an opulent room, similar and yet completely unlike some of the rooms in the palace at Wakanda. The aesthetic is completely different, and yet the richness and grandeur of the rooms themselves remind Bucky of one another. Perhaps it's something about royalty. Where the rooms in the Wakandan palace were brightly colored with geometric patterns, this room is all gold and tile mosaics depicting, Bucky supposes, the royalty or the gods or something. There's statuary, and everything is decorated with gold and bronze. It's beautiful, like all of Asgard that Bucky has seen so far, and meant, he thinks, to impress a visitor with the wealth and power of Asgard. He can't say it's not working.

Much sooner than Bucky would have thought for a queen and a goddess, the click of heels in the marble corridor heralds the return of Heimdall, accompanied this time by a statuesque woman in a green gown and armor. Her hair is gold, threaded here and there with silver, twisted in a crown around her head and bound in a braid as thick as her wrist, studded with gold-set jewels that sparkle as they catch the light. Her face is stern but kind, and Bucky sees the tracks of years spent smiling in the lines by her eyes and mouth. Her gaze goes immediately to the hammer in Steve's hand.

"Did my son give that to you?" she asks. In her voice is the certainty of someone who already knows the answer to the question they ask.

"Yes ma'am," Steve says.

A complicated set of emotions crosses her face, and Bucky can't read any of them, and wouldn't presume to guess what they are. "Then you must have had good reason to use it, and he to let you."

"We thought so, ma'am," Steve says. "There was a threat bigger than Midgard."

She nods and looks from the hammer to his other hand, fingers closed tightly around the stone in its case. "And what else have you brought me?"

"This was part of Jane Foster when we borrowed it to take to our timeline," Steve says. "But I wouldn't feel right about giving it back to her, not the way she had it."

"But you would give it to me," she says, and there's no question in her tone of voice, but Bucky thinks he hears one all the same.

"She is mortal, and you aren't," he says. She turns her gaze on him, and it sharpens as she takes him in: whatever his expression is doing, the arm, whatever tells she might see that speak of the violence of his history.

"These are dangerous gifts," she observes. "And yet, I will do my best keep them safe." She holds out her hand and Steve puts the stone and it, but when he tries to give her the hammer, she shakes her head. "I have my own worth, but it's not the sort that Mjölnir judges."

Bucky has to turn that over in his head, suddenly, because he knew—he was proud—that the hammer had judged Steve worthy, but what does it mean that she can't hold it and Steve can? She's a goddess, an alien, and Steve is just a human man. Or is he?

"Heimdall," she says, and stretches out the hand holding the stone in an imperious gesture. "There is no one I judge safer to keep this." She furrows her brow and looks at Heimdall, and some look that Bucky doesn't understand passes between them. "And it may be that you have longer than I would to hold it and keep it safe."

"As you wish," he says, but he sounds troubled.

"As for you, Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes." Bucky twitches, just a little bit, because he's not sure how she knows that title. They never gave their ranks to Heimdall, did they? Bucky would not have—he doesn't think of himself as Sergeant Barnes, and isn't sure that he did even when he answered to it when people called. But they trail after her regardless, Steve still with the hammer, and Bucky following Steve into whatever fresh trouble he's found, just like always.

Frigga leads them through a maze of corridors to a room—well, to a suite of rooms. It's pretty obvious that it's Thor's; there's a distinct lightning motif in the decor. Steve's face softens looking around the room—a sitting room furnished with oversized chairs and tables in a golden wood, plush rugs thrown across the tile floor, tapestries hanging from the walls. There are large, arched windows that look out over the palace grounds and beyond to the city, bustling with life. A pang shoots through Bucky's heart; as beautiful as this is, as lively as it seems, in his own timeline, most of the people are dead and the city is in ruins. 

But for now, he reminds himself, in this timeline, the city and its people—and its queen—live. Frigga is watching him when he turns from the window, and again, her eyes are shrewd, assessing. Bucky looks away, unable to bear the weight of her gaze.

"There," she says, pointing to a rack on the wall. "That's where he keeps it."

It's an armor rack and there are swords and axes and knives that Bucky might otherwise be quite interested in, but at the moment, his eyes are drawn to the decorative space at the apex where a place is clearly left for a missing weapon. It's the highest and the most decorative, knotwork swirling over metal prongs that curve gently upward to hold what isn't there.

"Mjölnir came when you called," Frigga whispers.

Steve hesitates in the act of raising the hammer and turns to her. He holds Mjölnir up and lets the lightning fill his eyes, not calling the power forth for use, but merely—holding it, to show Frigga.

And Bucky sees it too, sees what he can only think of as divinity, even if that would have his mother and Steve's alike smacking his hand for blasphemy, reflected across his best friend's face.

Steve holds the hammer out to Frigga, sparks dancing down his arms, blue lightning flickering over his eyes. The smile she turns on them is sad, full of grief, but also full of benediction.

"Thank you," she says.

Steve turns and places Mjölnir on the rack, in the place waiting for it. It settles in and tiny bolts of electricity dart down the metal then dissipate. The blue light fades from Steve's eyes, leaving behind only the familiar, human blue that Bucky knows as well as—better than—his own reflection.

But Bucky knows better now then to think that what's left in its wake is also only human. Steve's more than that, and maybe he has been for a long time, or maybe he always was, but Bucky knows it now in a way he can't forget—and he wonders how he ever did, from the moment he emerged from that portal that bridged the distance between Wakanda and the Avengers facility. He had let himself forget, because he was selfish, and because Steve's his friend, but the ache in his throat now only serves to remind him of just how selfish he's been.

Steve turns to him and smiles, though, the weight visibly lifted off his shoulders, and Bucky makes himself smile back because this is it. They did it; the two of them have returned the stones that it took so many Avengers to collect. The timelines won't explode, or unravel, or whatever it is that all of them were so worried they would do. And if they've done their share of meddling, he's only sorry that they don't have a blueprint for Frigga to avoid her horrors the way they did for Natasha and Peggy.

"Thank you," Frigga says again. "My son will be grateful to have his hammer back, and we will take care of the stone for you—for all of us."

"Thank you, ma'am," Steve says. "If there's anything we can do to help—"

But Frigga is already shaking her head. "See yourselves back safely to your home." She takes Steve's hand between her own. "It is good to have met you, Steven Rogers of Midgard. I begin to understand what my son sees in your world."

Steve turns red and stammers, of course, because he was never very good at taking a compliment, much less from a beautiful woman.

"I am glad to have met you as well, James Barnes." Somewhat to his surprise, she takes his hand as well, and he feels a subtle power lapping at him, a friendly touch like the warmth of a candle flame. "All will be well," she tells him, and he finds, when she says it, he could almost believe it.

They say their farewells, and Heimdall leads them back across the rainbow bridge to the room where they first entered Asgard. The briefcase full of stones they brought with them is empty; the mission is complete. "We did it, Bucky." Steve sounds almost surprised, and Bucky can't blame him. He hopes Steve feels only the satisfaction of a job well done, impossible odds overcome yet again, not this hollow ache that settles into Bucky's breast.

"Let's go home," Bucky says, aware even as he says it that there's hardly a home for them to return to.

But Steve smiles at him, and that smile is worth any number of white lies.

~o~


	2. Redeemers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "How you holding up?" Sam asks, and Bucky tries to drag his wandering thoughts back to the point.
> 
> "All right," Bucky says, and thinks it might be true. "Tired," he adds, because that's definitely true.
> 
> ~o~
> 
> In which Bucky finds ways to help. 

~o~

**Part Two: Atonement**

**Chapter One: Redeemers**

They reappear on the platform, five seconds after they left it. But in those five seconds Natasha Romanoff has  _ also  _ reappeared on the platform, so it's a cacophony of overjoyed confusion that they appear into.

There's a lot of celebration happening, a lot of  _ hows,  _ and  _ whys,  _ and  _ you did it! Did you do it? _ It's all very loud, even though it's the happy kind of loud.

Steve gets pulled away almost immediately into a maelstrom of questions and excitement. He glances back at Bucky over his shoulder, but he doesn't have time to do much more, not with the questions and statements that everyone's throwing at him and Natasha. It's easy enough for Bucky to slip back into the shadows, not avoiding anyone, but only answering a question here or there. It's easier because they don't know him as well, most of them; he's an unknown quantity to nearly everyone; everyone except Steve, and to a lesser extent, Sam, Natasha, and Wanda—the people who came with Steve to Wakanda while Bucky was living there.

Bucky takes the chance to slip away to the shared temporary housing that everyone's been staying in. He's been sharing a room with Steve and Sam before he and Steve went on their mission, but right now there's no one there but him, and he takes the opportunity to shower off the feel of other times, other worlds. The hot water on his back is grounding, and the shampoo smells just like it did before they left. They've spent subjective weeks traveling through other universes where maybe they won't—Bucky won't—end up as fucked up as he is in this one, but in the end, it comes down to this: he's done what he's done, and this version of him will never get away from it.

He emerges from the shower scrubbed shiny and thoughtful, pulling on clean sweatpants and a clean t-shirt. They feel good, soft against his skin. The time suits are like tactical gear in terms of level of comfort; you can't help but get sweaty underneath the heavy, inflexible fabric, and no matter how carefully you fit your gear, parts of it always rub against you wrong. But this feels good, this feels soft and comfortable and like he could lounge for hours, or fall asleep face down on the bed, if he likes. He's not sure; he doesn't know what he wants to do.

He comes out of the bathroom to find Sam waiting for him on the bed. He likes Sam; they got off to a difficult start, what with the attempted murder and all, but Sam seems to have come around to think that Bucky is at least all right, and Bucky will take it. He's also been surprisingly supportive—standing next to Bucky when Bucky detached himself from Steve as tactfully as possible at Tony's funeral so that the family or any of the Avengers who blamed him (rightfully, he thinks in his guiltier moments, no matter how often Steve assured him that he wasn't to blame for the split) wouldn't have to be reminded of any of it by his presence.

But Sam had stood by him regardless, had put a hand on his shoulder like it didn't matter that Hydra had drilled holes in his memories, like it didn't matter what he had done. And they've never said it out loud—haven't needed to, not yet—but they're two houses both alike in loving Steve Rogers, in their own ways. If civil hands have made civil blood unclean, that's all on Bucky, though Steve at least seems to believe that he's blameless. 

"How you holding up?" Sam asks, and Bucky tries to drag his wandering thoughts back to the point.

"All right," Bucky says, and thinks it might be true. "Tired," he adds, because that's  _ definitely  _ true.

Sam snorts. "At least you admit it. Steve's out there trying to act like he can keep going for weeks if we need him to." Sam shakes his head. "What was it like?" 

"It was—difficult, in a lot of ways," Bucky says slowly. "I think we did some good, and those other times. Definitely did some good finding Natasha." And it's weird to think about, too, because he knows her a little better now, after spending so much time with her counterpart in 2012; only the thing is, that's still not her, not Natasha of 2023…no more than the Steve he knew a few weeks and five years ago is the Steve that he knows now.

"Yeah, I'm glad we've got her back," Sam says. Bucky can hear a wealth of emotion in his voice. He'd gotten to know her a lot better than Bucky had, running missions together. You find out a lot about other people under stressful situations, and running missions together definitely can qualify.

Of course, a lot of what Bucky had found out running missions was that his handlers were assholes. Hardly illuminating.

"I'm glad to be back," Bucky says, and then, because Sam came looking for him and asked how he was, he adds, "I can't quite make myself think of it as  _ back home _ , though."

Sam snorts. "Yeah, I know what you mean. You're not the only one having trouble with that."

Bucky scrubs a hand across his eyes. "I just thought—I thought I was done missing time." He bites his lip; he didn't mean to sound so whiny.

But Sam doesn't miss a beat. "The way I see it, that puts you in a position uniquely qualified to help a lot of people who are going to be struggling."

Bucky sits up straighter, completely stunned. It would never in a million years have occurred to him to think of it that way, but…Yeah. He does have more experience with this kind of thing than anyone except Steve. "Holy shit."

Sam laughs. It's a nice sound, and it's nice, too, to think of him smiling, eyes creased up with mirth instead of narrowed, assessing Bucky as a threat. "Good! Good. It's important to help people learn how to live day to day, too, man. You can help other ways besides punching shit or shooting things." He stretches. "I'm gonna take advantage of the shower if you're done. Looks like it's shaping up to be a pretty big party tonight."

"Maybe I'll just stay in, then," Bucky mutters.

"Nope," Sam says, and points at Bucky. "Steve will absolutely lose his shit if you're not there, and I won't be able to enjoy myself either knowing that you're moping by yourself in the dark."

"I wasn't gonna mope!" Bucky picks up a thick paperback that he'd just started before he and Steve left to return the stones. It's about rabbits, and it's really good. "I have a very pressing engagement with a book. Besides, Steve's been stuck with my ugly mug for weeks now. I think he can get along without it for a couple of hours."

"That doesn't sound like the Steve Rogers I know," Sam says as he picks up a stack of clean clothes.

Because he's a coward about some things, Bucky waits until Sam shuts the bathroom door to say, very quietly, "But that was five years ago to him."

~o~

Bucky does go to the party, though, because despite what he said, he sees that this is something to celebrate, too. He makes a mental deal with himself that if there's too many people and it's too much for him, he can go back to their room and read. The Avengers and Avenger-adjacent people are spread out in a flat expanse of grass by the temporary housing. There's a bonfire and sparks are flying up into the darkening sky to meet the emerging stars. Banner is manning a grill one-handed, helped by Rhodey and Lang, and Lang's friend Luis, who is supervising or maybe just talking their ears off, judging by how wildly he's gesticulating. It's a nice night, and the air is cool against his skin, a beer that someone handed him staying cold in his left hand.

He used to enjoy this sort of thing, he knows, and he can even remember some of it: Bucky Barnes in dance halls or in bars, flitting from dance to dance or table to table with the ease of a social butterfly. But the center of his orbit was always Steve, and no matter how far he circled out, he always circled back in, secure in his regard for Steve and Steve's regard for him. Bucky wishes that kid knew how good he had it.

He's still orbiting Steve, but he no longer feels very secure. Despite what Sam said earlier, Steve doesn't spend a lot of time with him. His eyes do seek Bucky out every now and again, and Bucky knows he should be grateful for that, grateful that Steve is still checking on him and making sure that he's okay. But Steve has had so many years now to get used to living without Bucky Barnes; he's part of a whole lot of other orbits now, friendships that are clearly important to him and to them. And it's not that Bucky doesn't want that for Steve—he's only ever wanted everyone else to see Steve the way he does—but he's clear-sighted enough to know that he's also small enough, selfish enough, to want to be the most important to Steve.

He wanted that even when he wouldn't admit to himself what else he wanted from Steve.

He might not have been able to admit to himself that his love for Steve was more eros than agape when he was a teenager, even when his body had made its position clear, or in Europe, when he had admired the swell of Steve's chest and shoulders, even while at the same time he mourned that he would never be able to pull Steve into his lap the way he'd thought and thought about—and how much denial did you have to be in to pretend that  _ that  _ was a brotherly love sort of thought—but once he'd gotten himself sorted out in Bucharest, after he'd journaled his way through half his weight in dime store notebooks, even he hadn't been able to deny the evidence of his own feelings. And in Wakanda, he'd thought—maybe. Maybe he could even talk to Steve about it.

But he hadn't, had he. And now he didn't know if he should, or even could. In some ways he felt like he and Steve still fit together, the same as ever, but in some ways he felt that they were miles apart, maybe further now than any point when Bucky had known who he was. If it came down to it, he was still the guy who'd been the Winter Soldier, a murderer for Hydra, and Steve was so pure of heart that he was worthy to pick up Mjölnir. Steve had more than touched the face of the divine, he had  _ been  _ divine, if only for the space of minutes. Bucky had let himself start to think that maybe it was possible, that maybe a friendship so intense as theirs could only be love, the kind of love he'd felt his entire life, even when he hadn't recognized what it was.

But now—he just didn't know.

And watching Steve move around the party, watching the easy way he interacts with everyone, it's clear that Steve doesn't need him. Whatever Bucky-shaped hole there had been in his life—and Bucky knows that there had been one—it's clear that it's now healed; an open wound filled in with scar tissue, no longer raw and bleeding.

"If your wheels grind any harder, I'm going to see smoke coming out of your ears."

Bucky feels the smile breaking out across his face before he even turns around to get a look at the speaker.

"Shuri!" He spreads his arms wide and is rewarded with a quick hug from the Wakandan princess and then a complicated handshake that he's sure to fuck up. She laughs at him when he inevitably does. "When did you get here?"

"I've been at the outreach center," she says. "We've been talking about expanding, making more of them. The world needs a lot of help right now, and we have a lot of resources."

"If there's anything I can do to help, let me know," he says, and immediately feels like an idiot, because she's a princess of an immensely wealthy and technologically advanced country, not to mention a genius and engineer, like, personally, and he's just a guy from the last century who never finished high school and whose claim to fame is he's strong and he can shoot things. 

But Shuri eyes him speculatively nonetheless. "Hmmm," she says, "I'll hold you to that. I heard you put the multiverse back the way it was meant to be."

"Mostly Steve did it," he says, "but I helped."

Shuri snorts. "Is that what he'll say if I ask him?"

He can't help blushing; he doesn't have control of his capillaries. "I don't know what he'll say."

Wakandan culture doesn't have any particular taboo against same-sex relationships and never has, and Shuri picked up pretty early on that Bucky thinks the sun rose and set on Steve Rogers, and she likes to fluster him.

"Maybe I'll just ask him myself," Shuri says. "It looks like he's talking to my brother."

Bucky looks over, and sure enough, Steve and T'Challa are involved in a discussion. It looks a little more serious than some of the other conversations Steve's had that evening, but they're both smiling. "I'll leave you to it," Bucky says.

Shuri gives him a sharp elbow to the ribs. "Don't skulk in the shadows all night. I'll see you soon, I'm certain of it."

She leaves him, but the encounter puts Bucky in a much better mood, so instead of standing back (not skulking, thanks Shuri) in the shadows, he made an effort to walk around and look for people he feels comfortable talking to: Sam, Wanda, and Natasha. He sees Pepper and Morgan from a distance, but he doesn't really know them, doesn't know if even the sight of him might be unwelcome, so he makes sure to stay at a distance from them. He stays at the party for about two hours, but as the night goes on, the festivities get louder and more raucous, and he thinks longingly of the quiet of his room and his book. He's more than fulfilled the deal he'd struck with himself, so he turns to leave.

Steve is over by the bonfire, sharing a drink and laughing with Colonel Rhodes, but he seems to notice Bucky's movements because he catches his eye, the furrow between his eyebrows that Bucky is so fond of deepening. He raises one eyebrow in a clear request to know if everything is all right, so Bucky smiles at him, and holds up his hands and mimes opening a book. Steve laughs and relaxes and turns back to his conversation, and Bucky makes his escape.

~o~

Sam's right; there's a lot that needs doing, and not enough hands to do it. Bucky doesn't have the skill set to solve the housing crisis that five years of severe underpopulation and neglect of buildings left, nor does he want to be the person in charge of rehoming the people who had moved into empty houses whose former tenants had now reappeared. He doesn't have the skill set or the knowledge to tackle the food shortages or the sudden desperate need to ramp up production in nearly every industry.

But what he does have is the willingness to listen to despairing people talk, and to reassure them that people are working on it, that they're not going to be left hanging in this weird limbo forever. He doesn’t really like talking about himself, but people do know who he is now, and it does seem like talking about what it’s like to be displaced helps, both the people who’d experienced the snap with him, and those struggling to come to terms with the return of the loved ones they’d grieved once already. He wonders if Steve ever talks to people like this, about waking up to find the time you knew irretrievably gone. He wonders if it helps, if he does. 

He also has strong arms and a back he can bend to the work of digging rubble out of abandoned buildings, the knowledge of someone who had to do most of the repairs to his and Steve's apartment and his folks' brownstone back in the 1930s. He wouldn't trust himself to do any serious plumbing and god knows the wiring has evolved from the days he was splitting off their electricity to Mrs. Goldfarb in the next apartment, but he can scrub mold and mildew and dirt and soot off walls that haven't been cleaned in five years; he can patch holes that animals have chewed in drywall, or regrout tiles that have deteriorated. It's not glamorous, he guesses, but it needs doing, and there's something incredibly satisfying about fixing things, about using hands that have been weapons to build. He likes to think about it, when he's elbow-deep in the innards of a possum nest in what used to be wiring, clearing it out so the electricians can come in behind him.

In addition to the frankly more fulfilling work of helping people rebuild their lives and homes, Bucky goes out with the Avengers to fight. Every two-bit villain with an axe to grind is grinding it. There are power vacancies worldwide as structures put in place over the last five years to deal with half the population going missing are suddenly completely unequipped and ill-suited to deal with the missing people's sudden return.

Some assholes are trying to raise the banner of AIM again, and Bucky is certain that if he waits long enough, he'll hear of some white nationalist neo-nazi bullshit that's Hydra under a different name.

But the worst offenders at the moment, at least on the local level, are the splintered remnants of a Christian fundamentalist sect, the Children of Christ Redeemer—Bucky is more inclined to think of it as a cult—that spring up after the snap, saying that the snap was actually the rapture, and that Thanos was secular propaganda intended to cover up what actually happened. Over the last five years, they've apparently used that as an excuse to bully the shit out of everyone around them, under the theory that only the sinful were left, and getting the sinful on a godly path might get God to take the rest of humanity as well—or if not, then at least the sinful would have been punished. It's no surprise to Bucky that their definition of sinful doesn’t include being a complete fucking asshole to those they deem immoral.

The problem now is that everyone that was snapped is back, so the Children of Christ Redeemer is undergoing a crisis, as it’s splintered into dozen or more subsects, each with a different take on the return of the missing people, and each with a different course of action to get the world back in line with their idea of godliness.

Perhaps this would have been a problem more for the local law enforcement than the Avengers, except that most law enforcement has been disbanded in the five year gap that Bucky missed. They’ve been largely replaced with social services and outreach programs, and what remains are overloaded with vandals and looters and a rash of domestic violence and homicide (not all the returned are met with the domestic situation that they left; enough people have mourned and moved on and are suddenly finding themselves bigamists or at least embroiled in a lot of heartbreak.) In any case, at least one of the subsects has what they're calling a miracle worker—what appears to be an enhanced human, possibly like Wanda. Someone is setting fires and destroying buildings, and they don't seem to much care if they hurt or kill people along with it. 

That kind of situation makes it an Avengers problem, so when they get called out to deal with violence, usually inflicted by the Children of Christ Redeemer on those whose lives they disagree with, they make sure to send some of the superpowered people with them.

Bucky doesn't mind being the brute squad on these occasions. He doesn't think much of the kind of miracles that bring down the walls of a woman's shelter because there are unmarried mothers among them, or that set fire to a homeless shelter for queer youth; and even when there are no miracles of violence, there are the kind of military fetishists who think shooting machine guns into unarmed crowds is an act of courage. He's tired of fighting, but this is the kind of fight that it feels unreservedly good to participate in.

It's on the way back from one of these fights—this time nothing more than twenty or so unenhanced humans in camo and with guns who thought themselves tough as nails, and it had been Bucky's pleasure to prove to them otherwise—that Bucky runs into Shuri at the compound.

"Bucky," she says brightly when she sees him. "I was looking for you."

Bucky is sweaty and coming down off the adrenaline of a fight, and his clothes are marked with soot and dirt, but the sight of her brightens his day so much that he doesn't care. "Were you just in the neighborhood or did I do something?"

She laughs. "It's nothing you've done," she says. "It's something I hope you will do."

He pushes his sweaty hair back off his face. "Anything you need."

"How about I take you out to dinner?" She smiles. "I've got to talk to Dr. Banner about something, too—why don't you get cleaned up and I'll meet you by the main office?"

Steve's in the room when Bucky gets there, sitting on the bed, looking pensively at the wall. He turns when Bucky walks in, and the smile that widens his face strikes Bucky's heart in a familiar ache. Steve's always lit up when he saw Bucky, and Bucky has always brightened to see him, but now Bucky almost thinks he can see lightning still in Steve's eyes, and it hurts worse to think that even though Steve has never been for him, he's that much farther out of Bucky's reach now.

Steve wasn't on this latest mission; he was in D.C. meeting with legislators. It still blows Bucky's mind a little, to think of Steve helping shape policy, but then again, he's always known that Steve could do great things if he had the chance. And now he does.

"Hey, Buck," Steve says.

"You're back," Bucky says. "How was D.C.?"

Steve makes a face.

"That good, huh?" Bucky unbuckles his tactical jacket. 

"You'll be surprised to hear that politicians are stubborn and reactionary." Bucky snorts. "How did the mission go?"

"Fine. It was just regular Redeemer assholes. No one enhanced." Bucky gets all the buckles undone and unzips the jacket, taking a deep breath as its constriction eases.

"You're all right, though? No injuries?" Steve's big broad face is worried, not because there was much of an actual threat, but because it's Steve, and he can't help but worry.

Bucky pretends offense anyway. "Against these guys? You should've seen them, Steve, they were idiots."

"I'd rather have been knocking heads with you," Steve says, "instead of arguing with those bozos."

"I'm sure you were very convincing," Bucky says, grinning.

Steve rolls his eyes, and the look he turns on Bucky is so fond that it melts some unnameable internal organ in the chest region. "What are you up to? Can I take you out to eat?"

Bucky smiles; he knows Steve doesn't mean it that way, but his heart give a little pitter patter regardless to think about Steve taking into a restaurant like they were on a date. "I've actually got a prior engagement," he says, and Steve's face smooths out into a carefully blank look that Bucky knows is him hiding disappointment. It makes him feel about as soft as a roasted marshmallow. "I ran into Shuri and she asked if I wanted something to eat. I do have a prior prior engagement with the shower, though."

Why does Bucky get the impression that Steve's faintly relieved when he mentions Shuri's name? "You think she'd mind if I tag along?"

"Only way to find out is to ask. Give me ten to get presentable, and then we'll go."

"I know it takes longer than that for you to get your hair pretty," Steve says and he's grinning again. Bucky grabs a change of clothes and mimes throwing them at him before he heads to the bathroom.

The evening air is cool, but not cold and it's pleasant to walk next to Steve. Their arms bump into each other now and then as they make their way from what everyone is calling the dorms despite Sam's arguing that no one is in school to the office building.

Shuri and Dr. Banner are waiting out front, even though Bucky didn't take long getting changed. They're laughing and talking about something, and Bucky is past the stage of being struck all over again every time he sees Dr. Banner compared to the videos he had seen of the Hulk, while he was on his own for two years, researching Steve's team with the wistful interest of someone who had to know who Steve had around him but didn't think he'd ever be allowed to get close. It gives Bucky a little hope, to be honest; he and Dr. Banner aren't close—Dr. Banner is a quiet, private individual, no matter how much he likes to take selfies with kids, and Bucky is never really certain of his welcome with anyone except Steve—but both of them know what it is to be completely out of control of one's self, and both of them, Bucky hopes, are on the other side of it now.

"Bucky!" Shuri smiles when she sees them. Her gaze takes in Steve a little curiously and she raises an eyebrow at Bucky that Bucky pretends not to see. "Are you ready?"

"Sure am," Bucky says, smiling. Besides the fact that he owes Shuri and her brother and all of Wakanda an immense debt that he will never be able to repay, he genuinely likes the princess. She's funny and irreverent, and although a member of the royal family from the most technologically advanced country in the world and a grocer's daughter from depression-era Brooklyn should be nothing alike on paper, she reminds him of his sister Becca.

It made him comfortable with her far faster than he was with anyone else in Wakanda.

"I invited myself along," Steve says, "but if you need a word with just Bucky, I'm happy to have just invited myself along for the walk over."

"No, that's fine." Shuri smiles at them both. "It's nothing like that. We thought Bucky might do us a favor, but it would be good to get your opinion on it also, Captain Rogers."

"Please, call me Steve," Steve says, as he has requested probably the last ten times the two of them have seen each other. Bucky's not sure why Shuri keeps addressing him by his title, but doubtless it's some reason of her own personal amusement.

She turns to Dr. Banner. "You're welcome to join us, if you like."

Dr. Banner smiles gently and shakes his head. "Thanks for the offer, but I have some things I need to do here." Bucky doesn't doubt that's true, even if the things he needs to do are nothing more than spend some quiet time on his couch and catch up with his reading.

"The three of us then," Shuri says.

They take off walking. The compound is a little way out of town, but there's enough traffic to and from the compound—not only the Avengers and support staff, but officials who come to visit—that there's a couple of restaurants that have sprung up. Mostly they’re food trucks, but one enterprising soul has built a wooden pavilion with plastic walls she can roll down when it's raining that the food truck backs up to, so they can sit down and chat while they eat.

They get tacos and a pitcher of beer—Bucky doesn't think the taco truck actually has a liquor license, but it's not like that's a priority at the moment—and claim a table. There are other people here, and there's a pleasant buzz of conversation that carries along with the smell of frying meat and vegetables.

Shuri is not technically old enough to drink, but Bucky knows from living there that teenagers drink low-alcohol beer with their meals in Wakanda, and he's not going to be the one to tell her that she can't here; he'll just be careful and make sure that she doesn't accidentally get anything with a high alcohol content. He has no desire to explain either to her or to T'Challa why his teenage sister is drunk. But in his time over there, he had observed that it was not a culture of drinking, not like the one he grew up in, but instead one where you savored a few drinks with a meal rather than go out for the express purpose of getting drunk.

He doesn't really know what the culture's like now around alcohol; he’d gone to bars in Bucharest, drunk vodka and whiskey with old men with lined faces, but not often. Only when the desire to be around people and the desire to be sure that those people would not remember him later had risen up in equal parts.

But that was then and this is now; and now has Steve fumbling with the table number so the waiter can deliver their food, and Shuri laughing at something Steve said. For all that he's been through and everything that he's done and had done to him, he wouldn't be anywhere else but here and now, even if he regrets the years that Thanos stole from him nearly as much as those that Hydra took.

It's in the spirit of a great fuck you to both interdimensional aliens with a deranged plan that doesn't make any sense and would-be dictators with equally nonsensical doctrines about power and who deserves it that Bucky takes the pitcher of beer to the table and pours it for him and Steve and Shuri into the waiting plastic cups.

They all sit around a wooden picnic bench, and maybe Bucky ought to feel weird about going here with a princess, but he feels just fine about bringing his friend here. The waiter brings out an order of chips and salsa while they wait on their tacos and for a few minutes there's just the sound of the three of them snacking, and a few sentences exchanged about how good the salsa is, although Shuri would prefer it if it were a little spicier. Bucky, who had become quite the connoisseur of a white fish in red sauce that they served in Wakanda, knew that what she had in mind would burn your sinuses out, and while he privately thought the salsa could've used a bit more pepper in it, he'd have aimed for a midpoint between where it was and what Shuri had in mind.

"So, Bucky," she says after they've all had a few moments to load up on chips. "I know you're busy. But Wakanda has a proposition for you."

Bucky fumbles the chip he's holding, splattering salsa onto the tabletop. Steve snickers, and Bucky glares at him. "What do you need?" he asks Shuri, ignoring the smug idiocy of his best friend/the secret love of his life.

"Well," Shuri says. "We've been thinking. My brother and I feel that we are in a unique position to help right now. In fact, our outreach center in Oakland has continued to help throughout the five missing years." Her gaze darts to Steve, and then back to Bucky. Maybe it's weird for Steve to hear those years referred to that way, but Bucky agrees with Shuri that they do feel like missing years. He's heard people refer to them as the blip, but there's no way he could make himself call them that. It's far too flippant for how he feels about having those years stolen. "We want to coordinate our efforts with your efforts here," she goes on. "It was always the plan to open more outreach centers worldwide. The plan got put on hold while we were gone, but they’re needed even more now than they were five years ago." She pauses, looking expectantly from Bucky to Steve.

"That's wonderful," Bucky says. "I have better reason to know than most how much you can help people."

She waves her hand back and forth as though returning his autonomy was all in a day's work—which, to her, it was. "Yes, yes. We need a liaison between the Avengers and Wakanda. We’re going to be here a lot more, and T’Challa can handle whatever red tape the government throws at us, but I want to be sure there’s someone maintaining communications for all the things that enhanced individuals might get up to the next time a threat of global significance approaches. We don’t want to get caught off guard. I want it to be you. General Okoye and Natasha have their own network, but they're both very busy." Bucky smiles at the implication that whatever he's doing is unimportant, relatively speaking. It's pretty much true anyway.

"What would that entail?"

"You just keep on doing whatever it is sad one hundred-year-old men do, but you also get to be in regular touch with me." Shuri gives him a bright smile. “You come look at the sites and give me your opinion, and keep me apprised of what sort of threats the Avengers have in their sights. And in return, I’ll let you know what we see coming. We’ve got an entire department turning our eyes toward the skies now.”

At that moment, their food comes, and there are a few minutes of jostling as everyone gets their food: Carnitas for Shuri, fish tacos for Bucky, and all American beef for Steve.

"Of course I will," Bucky says once everything's sorted. "Anything you need me to do."

"We are focusing a lot of our first efforts much closer to home," Shuri says. "But the outreach center in Oakland has done well, and there are plenty of other underserved communities that need help."

Bucky snorts a laugh. "Hard to think of any community anywhere that isn't underserved right now."

"Yes, but some much more so than others," Shuri says.

Bucky nods in acknowledgment—not everyone has the Avengers compound close by, or a functional infrastructure, and places that were already not doing well before Thanos are doing even worse now, mostly—and for a little while, there's not much conversation as they all dig in. Once they finish up and clean their hands—the tacos are delicious, but also messy—they tip the waiter and start walking back toward the compound.

"I was sure you'd say yes," Shuri says, shooting a smile at Bucky. He smiles back: he's happy to be predictable in that way. "So I brought you something." She passes him a small plain box.

Bucky opens it, and sees what's inside: the familiar gleam of a set of kimoyo beads, possibly even the same ones he'd worn in Wakanda. His throat tightens.

"Shuri…thank you." He fumbles with his vibranium fingers to tie them around his right wrist.

"Here, let me." Steve looks at him, waiting for permission, which Bucky grants with a nod.

"You're our liaison now," Shuri says. "You didn't think I'd call you on the phone, now did you?"

"I guess not." Bucky laughs and spins one of the beads at his wrist. He missed having kimoyo beads; he likes them better than cell phones. "Well, just let me know what you need me to do."

"Trust me, we'll be in touch." They get back to the compound, and Shuri waves them goodbye as she walks over to a waiting Dora Milaje.

"Well, how about that," Bucky says vaguely, spinning the bead again. It's nice; a reminder that other people find value in him, not just Steve, Steve with his steadfast friendship. Bucky knows how lucky he is to have Steve, but he knows how lucky he is to have Shuri too.

A big hand grips his shoulder, and he looks up into Steve's blue eyes. They aren't laughing now, but serious and intent on Bucky's own. "I'm glad, Buck. They couldn't have picked anyone better."

Half of Bucky wants to melt at the sentiment and half of him wants to shy away because it's so manifestly not true. "Well," he says awkwardly, "at least I know them already, right? It's not like they'll have to ask a stranger to help out."

Steve blows out a breath, and there's something between fondness and frustration in his expression. "Come on, I'll buy you a beer to celebrate."

"You mean you'll pull me a beer out of the minifridge in our room." Bucky nudges Steve with his shoulder. 

"Don't say I don't know how to treat you right," Steve says, smiling, and Bucky's heart aches a little, but it's a sweet pain, like holding his fingers a little too close to a fire: it might burn him eventually, but the warmth feels so good.

~o~

The Children of Christ Redeemer seem to ramp up their plan of attack. Hardly a week or two goes by without an attack of some kind, even if their so-called miracle worker remains elusive. It's not that Bucky is spoiling for a fight with him or her, but he wants it over with, the constant search for a fight with these people. He thinks—and Steve agrees—that a lot of the Redeemers' teeth would be pulled without their miracle worker.

Just the thought of them bothers Bucky. He knows that not everything is better in the future, but people are a lot more accepting than they were when he and Steve were coming up. Sarah Rogers being a single mother wouldn't have gotten nearly the side-eye these days that she did when they were kids. And Bucky wanting to kiss men hardly rates a mention—they've got a whole parade for it now, and you can go see men in drag singing torch songs any day of the week, if you like. But the Children of the Redeemer have a real hard on for superpowers since snap was reversed. They might have argued that Thanos was propaganda to cover up the Rapture, but they're real pissed at the people who went and got it reversed. And since Tony is dead, and so is Natasha, as far as they know, Thor's off-planet, Clint's gone to back to his farm, and Dr. Banner mostly works the science side of things now, the real face of the Avengers at the moment is Steve, nevermind that Scott and Wanda and the rest of them are all still kicking around. Steve is the most visible remaining original Avenger, and he's been the mission head since the battle of New York, so he's the one they seem to be focusing on.

So really, Bucky's fine with Steve stuck in D.C. arguing with politicians while he and Sam and the others take care of the Redeemers.

Bucky tries to keep on top of the chatter that the Redeemers are putting out. Natasha helps him with the internet side of things, because he's not entirely ignorant, but while he's trying to catch up, most of his knowledge is five years out of date. She sets up a feed for him, even from sites that are supposed to be secure, and ones that are supposed to be on the air quotes dark web air quotes or whatever.

It makes Bucky a little sick to read through them sometime, just thinking about how hateful people have to be about anyone not exactly like themselves to say things like that. They don't like queers, they don't seem to like women much, even the women among them, especially if they have sex, and while the Children of Christ Redeemer official website claims that they are open to all, Bucky can tell from the dog whistles that they much prefer you be white if you're going to sign up for their party. They're fundamentalist evangelicals to the core, and they don't like any other flavor of Christianity, much less any other religion. And anyone with superpowers is a straight-up abomination in the eyes of God, and Steve in particular is an example of humans stepping above themselves to take up the mantle of what should be reserved for divinity. What they say about Dr. Erskine would have Steve spitting mad, so Bucky figures it's best if he just never tells him about it. Steve's got enough on his plate without this in his head.

But it makes Bucky want to laugh, even while he's feeling sick, because for all their talk about what should be reserved for God, they don't know a thing about it.

The closest thing Bucky's ever seen to the divine has blond hair and an attitude, and more moral certainty in his pinky toe than resides in an entire congregation of Children of the Redeemer.

But that's not the conversation that he thinks many of the Redeemers are having with themselves. He does wonder about their miracle worker; he thinks about what Wanda has told him of her time as von Strucker's weapon. She wasn't brainwashed, at least not the way he was, turned into a mindless shell of herself; but she was brainwashed nonetheless, lied to, had her own moral certainties turned on their head. So he wonders what the Redeemers have told their magic worker.

And then he has to wonder if they have more than one.

They've gotten used to arson and destruction perpetrated by the Redeemers, but Hill brings them reports of something almost worse, Bucky's mind.

There's a small town in Virginia where some of the residents perpetrated awful crimes on the others, tore down houses, killed people, beat others senseless. People who did it were horrified—after the fact. They woke up with the memory of a fierce, burning certainty that the people in their town were immoral and deserve to be brought to God the violent way. For days, the people who committed the crimes had nosebleeds, splitting migraines, and for most of them, a terrible certainty that it was only the very least of what they deserved.

Hill delivers the report and a level, even voice, but Bucky has to excuse himself part of the way through. He makes it to the bathroom before he throws up, so there's that, at least. He brings up breakfast, and then rinses his mouth out and splashes water on his face. The door creaks as it opens, and he expects it to be Steve, but it's Wanda who comes to find him.

"Steve wanted to follow you," she says quietly, "but I asked him if I could instead."

"Thanks," he says. He likes Wanda, but he’s surprised. He got to know her a little in Wakanda, when Steve's team would come to visit sometimes between missions; they didn't come as often as Steve did, but then, Steve was there every chance he got.

"We'll find them," she says. "We'll make sure they can't keep doing this."

"What about their miracle worker," he says hoarsely.

She shrugs. "We'll help him if we can, and stop him if we can't."

"Very pragmatic." He wipes his face again.

She smiles a crooked smile. "I want to save him if we can. I don't know how they'll have made him think he's the only person with super powers in the whole world that it's acceptable to use, but..those kinds of lies get in your head." He meets her gaze. They were both lied to, when it comes down to it; she was told she was getting justice for a terrible crime, and he was told he was shaping a better world. 

"He might not think that," Bucky says. "They might have told him what he’s doing is the only way to make the world a better place."

Wanda shudders, a little shake like a horse trying to get rid of a fly. "We won't know until we find him, I guess." She puts a hand on Bucky's shoulder, and it's all right. He's gotten better at contact, and this doesn't make him nervous. It just feels friendly. He hopes she’s drawing some comfort from it too. "But more important than why he's doing it is keeping him from doing it again."

"Yeah," Bucky says and if his voice lacks the fervor that he feels, it doesn't mean he doesn't mean it. The thought of those people, forced to hurt the ones they love—he bites down on his lip. The best thing he can do is try to keep it from happening again.

~o~

The Redeemers keep their head down for a little while after their success in Virginia, and Bucky is busy trying to help people get settled in housing, the never-ending work of clearing out ruined buildings and making them habitable, and being at Shuri's beck and call.

He doesn't mind running interference between the Avengers and Wakanda; they all want the same thing, and Shuri and T'Challa are not hamstrung by whatever is left of the Sokovia Accords. Steve says—and Bucky agrees—that if there's any kind of international incident where it's clear that they're needed, then fuck the Accords. But until that happens, they're keeping their efforts more local, sorting out the issues in their own backyards. Bucky knows that the Avengers are hardly the only superhero racket in the world; in his time in hiding in Europe, he had plenty of opportunities to acquaint himself with the antics of various European teams, so it's not like there's no enhanced muscle anywhere else in the world. Hell, they're not the only enhanced team on this continent—there are the X-Men, Alpha Flight in Canada, and La Liga Mágica based out of Mexico City. The Avengers are hardly unique, and the thought gives Bucky peace when he wakes in the middle of the night, swallowing his nightmares so he doesn't wake up Steve or Sam. If the next Thanos takes the Avengers out, the world won't end. It'll just mean their enhanced neighbors have to stretch a little to cover the gap they leave. 

But he doesn't dwell on that either.

He works on doing the best job he can, and also on keeping his feelings under wraps. He just needs to get himself back to the place where he can look at Steve and be content with their friendship, and not this—this ceaseless, hopeless longing. He can't possibly doubt that Steve loves him, not after everything they've been through; he knows it's more than he deserves, but he can't help wanting.

It's easy to make a little bit of distance between them, in a way, because their schedules are so different, and so unpredictable. There's never a time when they're not on call—all of the Avengers are ready to go all the time. It's not sustainable, but right now, while everything is in flux and people are trying to take advantage of the chaos, they need to be ready for anything. 

It means everyone's run a little ragged, and he and Steve are just as exhausted as everyone else. They're tired when they're not running ops or going to meetings or whatever Steve does in D.C., and sometimes they go days without seeing each other, days in which the sounds of Steve and Sam breathing as they sleep are nearly the most conversation Bucky has outside of ops.

Bucky feels tired, but it's in a satisfying way, the way he'd felt in Wakanda after a hard day's labor, although he slept much better then. Less satisfying is the way he feels constantly vigilant, body attuned to alarms even when they're not coming.

It comes as a surprise, but a welcome one, when Steve turns to him one morning and says, "Do you have anything scheduled for today?"

Bucky looks up from where he's lacing up his boots. He doesn't have anything today, actually, although he was planning on walking down to the housing center and seeing if anyone needed his help. But he doesn't remember the last time he and Steve did anything just the two of them, and trying to establish a little emotional distance doesn't mean he doesn't want to see Steve at all. He just wants to make sure that he's not putting expectations on Steve that Steve has no way of fulfilling. "No, assuming nothing explodes and we don't get called out, I'm actually free."

"Yeah, me too." The grin that breaks across Steve's face is nearly blinding, it's so bright. "Let's go somewhere."

Bucky laughs. "All right, what do you have in mind?"

"Let's go for a hike," Steve says. "We can pack a lunch, take in the outdoors when no one's trying to shoot us or anything." "Tony—" Steve falters, and that bright smile dims a little bit. "Tony put in a bunch of trails," he goes on after a moment, "and I've never really hiked them.”

"Then now seems like a good time to do it," Bucky says as gently as he can.

The two of them make sandwiches and pack fruit and jerky and bottles of water into backpacks, and set off onto the trails. It's a beautiful day—late enough in the spring that the sunshine is warm, but the air is still cool and brisk. They haven't even gone a mile before Bucky takes off his windbreaker and ties it around his waist, pleasantly warm from peaceful exertion, so different from how he feels when they fight or even when they train.

Bucky doesn't know much more about trees than if they're deciduous or evergreen, but he can appreciate the bright green of new growth, the pale yellow and pink of buds on branches. The trail follows a creek, and the quiet splash of the water over rocks makes a pleasant counterpoint to the rhythm of their footsteps. The breeze picks up, and Bucky turns his head toward it, nostrils flaring to take in the faint sense of vegetation, the smell of fresh water.

"It's beautiful, isn't it," Steve says quietly. The trail is taking them upward, up the hillside, staying parallel to the water. "Never thought I'd be living in the countryside."

Affection surges through Bucky. "We're not even five miles from town, you dumbass," he tells Steve fondly.

"It's the country compared to Brooklyn," Steve says, almost tripping over a tree root as he turns his head to shoot a grin at Bucky over his shoulder. They follow the trail for perhaps an hour and a half, until they come to a clearing where the water runs over a rock, not quite big enough to be called a waterfall, but beautiful nonetheless. A tree has fallen across the clearing, and it makes the perfect place to sit and eat a sandwich, so that's what they do.

"Did you—" Bucky stops. It's not really his place to ask, and it's been hours since Steve brought it up. 

Steve balls up the paper from his sandwich and jams it in a pocket of his backpack before he pulls out another sandwich. "Did I what?"

Bucky's own bite of sandwich suddenly is dry, a ball sticking in his throat. "I had a question about Stark, but I don't know—" He takes a sip from his water bottle to cover how awkward he feels. "I feel weird asking you about him."

"Why?" Steve asks bluntly.

"It's my fault you—" Bucky was about to say _ had a falling ou _ t, but it's really the least appropriate way of saying  _ tried to kill each other  _ he can think of. "It's my fault you stopped being friends."

Steve laughs. There's no humor in it; it's a pained, rueful sound. "For the record, whatever happened between me and Tony was not your fault, Bucky."

Bucky snorts. That's revisionist history if he's ever heard it.

"It wasn't," Steve insists. "We had problems before you came along, and problems after you were…gone." He sets down the sandwich and hugs his arms around his knees, leaning forward. He looks almost small, the way he is in the earliest memories Bucky can access. "Besides, you can ask me anything. There's nothing I don't want to tell you."

And God, that's a lot, because there are still things that Bucky doesn't want to tell Steve—how small he feels at the thought of Steve's tenure as a god, however brief. Bucky's feelings for Steve, now, and all the way back to their youth. That Steve just wants to be an open book is just another indicator of how much better he is than Bucky.

"Those missing five years," Bucky says. "Did you and Stark make up?"

Steve sighs, and looks down at his hands, clasped around his knees. "Not exactly. Enough to work together."

"Steve..." Bucky waits until Steve looks up and meets his eyes. "I'm sorry."

Steve sits up straight, then leans over and grabs Bucky's knee, his big hand warm even through Bucky's jeans. "You don't have a thing to be sorry about."

Bucky blows out a breath. "You don't have any regrets? None at all?"

Steve's face goes even more serious and his hand tightens on Bucky's leg. "No. You didn't do anything wrong. The things that were done to you...any blame attaches to the people who hurt you, who made you do the things you did—not to you. It's obvious to me, and if Tony had taken a moment to think about it, he would have felt the same way, I feel certain."

Bucky's not certain, not in the slightest, but he tries to make himself pretend.

They finish eating and walk back to the compound. Bucky tries not to think about Stark’s face, when he’d shot off Bucky’s arm, when he tried to turn his blasts on Steve; there was no room for forgiveness there. He tries not to think about all the regrets he has, and all the regrets Steve won’t admit to.

~o~


	3. Homecomings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's foolish to get complacent, but that's what Bucky does, without meaning to. He has a routine of work that is helpful to a number of other people, and it feels good. He fights, too, when he has to—but even that isn't so bad; it's a clean fight most of the time, against people who have chosen this battle. Not at all like assassinations or missions in the dark. He gets used to fighting people who strongly believe something that he is violently opposed to, and that kind of fight feels good. Uncomplicated.
> 
> But all good things come to an end, so he's not surprised when they finally get called out to fight the miracle worker.

**Part Two, Chapter Two: Belonging**

It's foolish to get complacent, but that's what Bucky does, without meaning to. He has a routine of work that is helpful to a number of other people, and it feels good. He fights, too, when he has to—but even that isn't so bad; it's a clean fight most of the time, against people who have chosen this battle. Not at all like assassinations or missions in the dark. He gets used to fighting people who strongly believe something that he is violently opposed to, and that kind of fight feels good. Uncomplicated.

But all good things come to an end, so he's not surprised when they finally get called out to fight the miracle worker.

The first sign that it's him is a building going up in flames, but the second sign is dozens of people turning against their loved ones. It's all hands on deck as far as the Avengers are concerned. Steve's here this time, and won't hear of hanging back.

"You know, they really hate you, like, specifically," Bucky mutters as Steve is outlining a strategy in the back of the quinjet. Said strategy involves Steve leading the charge.

"I'm counting on it," Steve says. "If they see me, the miracle worker or whoever is actually in charge will most likely try to hit hard where I am, and we can draw them out."

"I don't like you using yourself as bait." Bucky checks his guns and knives, making sure everything is in place.

Steve shrugs. "It's good strategy."

"Don't worry, Bucky," Wanda says. "I'll be keeping an eye on him."

Steve rolls his eyes, but Bucky is reassured. Wanda is their biggest gun in this fight—as near as they can tell, she has the best chance of freeing the mind controlled people, and of stopping the miracle worker's attacks.

"You keep an eye on  _ her _ ," Steve says, in a whisper. "If she's focused on mental attacks, she might be vulnerable to physical ones."

"Understood," Bucky murmurs, but if Steve thinks that will keep him from watching Steve's own six as well, he's gravely mistaken.

The redeemers are aiming for a bigger target this time; instead of a small town, the disturbance is taking place in Charlottesville, where the Children of the Redeemer might expect to find some ideological allies.

The local police have been trying to encourage residents to stay inside, but have backed off engaging with the Redeemers after one of their own was turned against the rest of the force and attacked them. Bucky has what he likes to think of as a healthy wariness of cops. Nonetheless, he feels for the man forced to turn against his comrades.

The Redeemers have gathered in front of the building they set ablaze, so that's where the Avengers are headed. They don't have a full complement at the moment; Colonel Rhodes is still in Washington, and Spider-Man, thankfully, is in school, but they have Sam as air support, Steve, Natasha, and Bucky on the ground, and Wanda tackling the problem of the mind controlled people.

Steve has gotten in touch with Colonel Rhodes, and Bucky hopes that he'll be able to get to the fight in time. He doesn't like the thought of Sam as their only air support. Maria Hill and Sharon Carter are joining them on the ground, but Bucky hopes they will be keeping their fragile, unenhanced bodies out of the main fight.

They see the smoke from the burning building from the air, a thick, dark plume of it curling up into a cloudless sky. There's a mass of people grouped in the square in front of the building, which has a new looking sign with brass letters spelling out  _ The Acceptance Center _ .

Bucky can't exactly tell what it's meant to be, but he's confident that acceptance is not high on the list of things the Children of the Redeemer want. Scathing judgment is more their speed. But it hardly matters at the moment.

The Redeemer forces are arrayed in front of the burning building, looking like they're ready for a fight. There are maybe two dozen of the kind of guy that Bucky has gotten used to fighting when they go up against the Redeemers: white and in their twenties, heads largely shaved, regrettable tattoos bedecking their skin. Most of them are clutching guns to their chests, and maybe there are a few of them with any real combat training, but in Bucky's experience, mostly they're more enthusiastic than skilled.

Arrayed with them are a bunch of blank-eyed kids, most of them appearing to be in their late teens. A lot of them have facial piercings and dyed hair, and darker skin. Bucky is willing to bet that these kids were the ones in the acceptance center, and if he had to guess, he'd say it was probably a place for queer youth—one of the many things the Redeemers hate.

There's a man with a megaphone standing in front of his troops. He looks older than most of them, in his fifties, if Bucky were to guess. He has silver hair and glasses, and is wearing khaki slacks and an ill-fitting blue checked shirt, a very different aesthetic from the skinheads around him. He looks utterly unprepossessing until he opens his mouth. Bucky’s never seen him in person before, but he knows who he is—Reverend Peter Applewhite, a charismatic preacher who’s let this sect of the Redeemers to prominence after the group splintered.

The man might look like a middle school teacher, but he's yelling like a firebrand, riling up his followers with a lot of talk about who is worthy to be a child of God—who is worthy to be redeemed. Bucky seems to recall that forgiveness was a big part of the whole Christian thing, but it doesn’t look it’s on anyone’s mind here. The people holding the guns shake them enthusiastically, and then the blank eyes of the mind-controlled kids take on a little life, and they start clapping their hands and stomping enthusiastically. It makes the skin on the back of Bucky's neck crawl.

Steve is murmuring over the comms about which of their targets to go after, and about how they should try to neutralize the kids without hurting them, as if anyone needs to be told that.

"Wanda—" Steve begins but she interrupts before he can get very far.

"I know," she says. "But the faster we find the miracle worker, the faster I'll be able to get them free."

"All right," Steve says. "Everyone spread out. Sam, let us know what you see from up there. They might have the miracle worker sequestered away from the rest of them, but my suspicion is he's going to be in earshot of the leader."

They spread out, approaching the group of Redeemers cautiously. As expected, when Applewhite sees them, he starts talking. Bucky's fingers tighten involuntarily on his gun. He can see flecks of spittle frothing off Applewhite’s lips when he yells at Steve.

"And we see before us the  _ prime _ example of the serpent in the grass. Was Steve Rogers content with God's plan? No! No, he was not. He thought he knew better than God. He let a foreign scientist meddle with the body that God gave him. And what do you think are the results?" He pauses only long enough to let his followers mutter back a bunch of things that sound like  _ pride! _ Or  _ devilry!  _ Then Applewhite draws in another breath and keeps going. "This man presents himself as a savior, as a fighter on the side of good, but he is a demon! He is the reason that we were not taken up to heaven to be by God's side! This so-called Captain America—created by a German scientist, if you recall—is nothing more than the first in a long line of people going against God's plan: strongmen and witches, freaks of nature, ungodly creatures who will steal the very thoughts from your mind and lure you into sin. None of them can be trusted as far as you could throw ‘em, and that's why we have to take back what's ours, for the good of everyone else on earth. Get  _ right  _ in the eyes of God! We can be  _ redeemed!" _

The crowd breaks out into enthusiastic applause at that, yelling their approval, even the mind-controlled kids. Bile churns in Bucky's stomach, and he sets his rifle more firmly on his shoulder so he can sight down it. He's tucked away behind the building, but he's not so far from Steve and Wanda that he can't take off running if he needs to. 

Applewhite’s put a big target on Steve’s chest, and all these people look ready for his blood. Bucky's not going to let that happen. As much as he burns to put a bullet in Applewhite’s head, they want to capture Applewhite if they possibly can; he's the ringleader of this particular movement, and he’s whipped up enough hate that the thought of it makes Bucky sick, but he's doubtless not the only person who leads the Redeemers’ splintered cells. Hydra isn't the only snake out there with more than one head.

Applewhite looks directly at Steve and smiles, a cold, mirthless expression. Bucky can't help but think that they're playing right into his hands, and he just wants to run out there and whisk Steve away to somewhere where this man and his miracle worker can't get him.

But that's not the plan, and Bucky knows better to think that that's how Steve Rogers works. It sends a chill down his spine regardless when Applewhite ducks his head down and mutters something into his collar; probably got a microphone clipped there. Maybe their miracle worker's not nearby after all. Bucky can't be one hundred percent sure, but he tries to read his lips, and he thinks he said something about  _ send the other abominations out front.  _ Sure enough, the mind controlled kids start moving forward in a group, teeth bared aggressively, some of them picking up rocks and wooden beams from the rubble around the burning building and brandishing them menacingly.

"All right," Steve murmurs into the comms. "Let's try not to hurt anybody, but don't let them hurt you either."

"I've got some tranqs," Bucky says, and sets his rifle down where he can get to it quickly and heaves the tranquilizer gun up to his shoulder instead. "I'll see how many I can take down." He sets actions to words and starts aiming carefully for the kids in the front line. In a perfect world, he'd have darts that were perfectly calibrated to his targets, but most of these are aimed at taking out about a two hundred pound man, so there's no problem with these teenagers, although he doesn't like the idea of overdosing them either. When he sees Natasha dart and among them with her widow's bites, he starts calling his shots so they can more efficiently work together with her without either of them targeting the same person.

It doesn't take too long before the Redeemers notice what they're doing and send in their actual converts.

There are more of them than Bucky's been usually fighting lately, but he's at least familiar with their tactics, such as they are. Even though the Avengers are wildly outnumbered, they're easily holding their own when everything goes terribly wrong. In the middle of batting aside skinheads with the twin shields T'Challa gave him, Steve falters. He takes a blow to the midsection that he ought to have easily parried, and stumbles to the side.

"Steve?" Wanda's voice over the comms sounds young, frightened.

Steve recovers a little and shoves away the nearest Redeemer. Bucky's already moving from his hiding place. "What the fuck's going on?" he hisses into his comms.

"The miracle worker's trying to get him too," Wanda says, her voice strained. "I'm trying to help, and of course Steve has a good supply of stubborness to begin with—"

"And if you take a snake unto your bosom, will you not be bitten?" Applewhite's voice rises above the crowd, and Bucky spares a thought to the fact that he could really learn to hate the sound of that resonant baritone. "But if we can hold the snake by the head, we can control his bite."

Steve falls to his knees, raising his arms to fend off his attackers, but his arms tremble as though he's straining against some invisible force.

Bucky's heart is pounding, because if they get Steve under their control—what might they make Steve do? Bucky didn't know until now that there was something he feared more than someone stealing his willpower again, but it's this. He has nightmares still, even though Shuri got the triggers out of his mind, even though he  _ knows _ , he's tested that no one can ever steal himself from himself, at least not the same way they did before. But he never anticipated this: Steve in danger of losing his mind to someone else's control, Steve in danger of losing himself in a way that Bucky knows all too intimately.

He can't let that happen.

"Guys," Sam says urgently, "there's someone in the burning building. A piece of the wreckage just fell, and it swung out of the way not to hit them."

"Alive?" Natasha asks urgently.

"Alive, and moving around calmly," Sam says. "Doing just fine, in fact. The smoke keeps swirling away from them."

"The miracle worker," Wanda says grimly. "I can't break their control on Steve." The frustration is evident in her voice.

Bucky's nearly to Steve, but he switches direction, launching himself past him, towards the burning building. He takes out some of the remaining thugs on his way, snatching the gun from one and twisting the barrel, throwing it at Applewhite’s temple. The older man looks astonished before the gun clips him on the head and he looks unconscious, slumping to the ground. Bucky takes a moment to hope that he's not dead, but truthfully, he doesn't care that much if he is. He throws himself into the burning building, metal arm up over his head to protect it from falling debris.

"Barnes, what the fuck," Sam says over the comms

For the first time, Bucky actually misses his mask. It would've filtered some of the smoke out of the air. As it is, he ducks down low and tries to breathe as little as possible. "Where's the miracle worker?" he rasps into his comm.

"You dumb, foolhardy bastard," Sam says. “Straight ahead. There's a hallway ahead of you, behind the welcome desk. Follow it back past two rooms, he's in the third one on the right."

Bucky ducks down and runs. The heat is intense, the flames he's running through getting thicker with every second, and he can feel his skin blistering and smell burning hair. What he wouldn't give for even a wet handkerchief to slap over his face, but that's is just as much in short supply as his mask right now. Instead, he concentrates on speed, Sam's whispered, "You're almost there," echoing in his ears.

He doesn't waste time on subtlety when he gets to the room, just lowers his left shoulder and barrels through the door like a battering ram. The air inside is blessedly cool compared to the air in the hallway and he takes a deep sucking breath of it, ignoring the urge to double over and cough.

The person desperately saying, "Reverend Pete? Reverend Pete?" into her headset is nothing like what he would've expected the miracle worker to be, if he had thought about it, but although the room is scorched and sooty, there are no flames burning, and they didn't rush in when he broke the door. He thinks this must have been some kind of conference room. The girl is young, in her late teens, if he were to guess, wearing jeans over what looks like a black leotard, her short-cropped hair nearly as bright a red as Natasha's. Her green eyes are wide with surprise as she takes him in.

"Reverend Pete's out for the count, kid," he says. "I don't know what else you're doing, but you need to get out of Steve's head."

Her eyes narrow, and that's all the warning he has before she tries to get into his mind. It's not like the Hydra wipe at all; he's still himself, but he suddenly feels conviction down to the bones of him, that what Applewhite was saying was right. He's an abomination; Steve is an abomination; the love he feels for him is wrong, sick, twisted in the eyes of God, and the only way to redeem himself is to go out and do what Applewhite has said, forcibly convert those he can and destroy those he can't.

But the kid's fucked up there, because while the thought of himself being a wrong thing is hardly foreign to him, he  _ knows  _ that Steve is good. It's not only the unshakable foundation of the current incarnation of himself, but it's been proven in ways no one can refute; he saw Steve pick up the hammer. He saw him call lightning. No amount of feeling imposed from outside of him could possibly subvert that knowledge. The two conflicting ideas inside of him make him feel physically ill, a buzz rising in his head that he's afraid might knock him out if it goes on too long.

It's untenable, and he won't last long, so he does the only thing he can think of to fight her. She's in his head; he can only hope that means she can see what’s in there. A moment of bleak humor hits him; he's been crafted into the perfect fighting machine, physically, but now he has to rely on his mind, by far the shakiest weapon in his arsenal.

He calls up his memories: the times that Hydra tortured him, the blank despair of being a thing, a weapon to be deployed and then put back in stasis, a useful object for the masters he was so unwilling to serve. He remembers all the terrible things he did, the lives he snuffed out with no more thought than a gun has when the trigger is pulled. He shows her pain, but more than that, he shows her the horror of being under someone else’s control. He lets himself remember the way it felt to succumb to the words under Zemo's command, the absolute terror that the self he had fought so hard to regain was slipping away, the knowledge that the man was going to use him against Steve. The knowledge that he was going to hurt Steve, again, and Steve would probably let him—again.

And then he lets himself remember Steve, the best man he's ever known.

Steve, taking punches in back alleys because he never met a fight he could walk away from regardless of his chances of winning it; Steve, larger and dreamlike, leaning over the table on which Bucky had been tortured as he freed Bucky from his restraints; Steve, broken and bloodied by Bucky's own hands as he dropped his shield, ready to die rather than live in a world where Bucky didn't know him; Steve, fighting a friend whom Bucky had grievously wronged, firm in his belief that Bucky had been a victim as much as Howard and Maria Stark had.

Bucky doesn't know if he's getting through to the miracle worker, but her face has gone pale and her eyes are filled with tears, so even if she doesn't feel what he does so strongly, maybe the effort it's taking to keep him subdued has made it easier for Steve to get away. He hears someone talking to him over the comms, a tinny voice inside his ear, but he can't summon up the strength to listen. All his focus is on all the good he's ever known of Steve, on how much he loves him, on how he would rather die than let Steve's mind be turned against itself. 

Something hot and wet slides down his upper lip from his nose, and he tastes the bright coppery tang of blood in his mouth. His head hurts, a vast, all-encompassing ache so great that he can barely feel the blisters and burns on his skin. His mind feels like it's tearing itself in two, and that's all right, that's preferable to her controlling him. He forces open watery eyes, unsure of when he even closed them, and her face is stricken—horrified, though whether by him, or the thought of Applewhite being hurt, or by something all else altogether he has no way of knowing. He sways on his knees before her—when did he fall to his knees?—and her eyes widen as her gaze snaps over his shoulder. 

Slowly, slowly as though moving through ice, Bucky turns and sees Steve jumping through the wall of flame outside the door, his uniform smoking, parts of it still burning, and a look Bucky's never seen on his face: grim, implacable determination, something cold in his eyes that eases a little bit when Bucky meets his gaze, but only a little bit.

"Steve," Bucky manages to gasp out.

The girl looks panicked, and Bucky feels the weight of her mind in his ease, which is bad, because that means she's turned her attention to Steve. Bucky's vision starts to gray out around the edges once she's gone, and he fights it, because he can't leave Steve alone in this fight.

But Steve leaps past Bucky, and Bucky thinks he sees something of the lightning in his eyes, sees it crackle around his hands as he touches the girl and she crumples to the floor.

"Bucky—" Steve whirls around without even checking to make sure the girl is really out (bad form, Steve), but before Bucky can answer him, the gray swallows his vision and he follows the miracle worker down into unconsciousness.

~o~

Bucky wakes.

He has a moment of confused panic where he's not sure where he is and he can't quite remember how he got there—two situations he does his best to avoid if at all possible. His eyes dart from side to side as he takes in the room; his panic eases as he realizes he's in the medical wing at the compound, in an adjustable hospital bed, but without any IVs, just a monitor over his right forefinger.

He calms down further when he sees Steve, asleep, slumped into the corner of a too-small couch, face stubbly and hair messed up, but clean and in civilian clothes rather than his uniform. If the situation were truly dire, Steve would have been ready to leap into action.

The events in Charlottesville come back to him then, his confrontation with the miracle worker; Steve's last-minute rescue, and the jolts of electricity that Bucky thought he saw. Does Steve still hold the spark—ha ha—of divinity within him? Is he still godlike even without the hammer?

Bucky raises an experimental hand to his head. It aches, but not badly. He runs his metal hand gently down his arm, looking for blisters, but most of them have already healed, so his burns must not have been that bad. The more pressing concern is the memories he relived of things he doesn't like to think about, his time with Hydra and all the tortures that entailed. It's not a physical hurt, but he feels wrong and tender all the same, a snail pulled out of its protective shell.

And his mouth is really dry. He desperately wants a drink of water. He sits up, looking to see if there's a cup within reach. He doesn't make much noise, but Steve stirs instantly, face breaking into a smile as he takes in the fact of Bucky's consciousness.

"You're awake," he says in a sleep-rough voice. "How do you feel?"

"Head hurts," Bucky reports. His own voice is just as hoarse. "Thirsty."

"Well, I can definitely help with that." Steve stretches unselfconsciously and then levers himself off the sofa, rotating his neck side to side. Bucky winces on his behalf as his vertebrae give an audible crack. He crosses to the shelf next to the sink, where a big insulated cup waits. He tops it off with water then brings it to Bucky, who takes a grateful sip. "Not too much too fast," Steve cautions.

Bucky lifts an eyebrow because this is not his first rodeo, but accepts the cup, cradling it in his left hand and taking small sips, as directed.

"What happened?" he asks, after he's had just enough water to barely assuage his thirst.

"You saved us, Buck." Steve clears his throat and flushes pink. "You saved me. I was going under. I was trying to fight her, but she was too strong, and I wouldn't have been able to fight her off for too much longer."

"And you saved me." Bucky shifts uncomfortably on the bed, not able to handle either the soft way Steve is looking at him right now, or the thought of Steve wielding lightning on his behalf. "What happened to her? The miracle worker. She looked like a kid."

"She is a kid," Steve says and his expression shifts, a little grimmer, a little sadder. "Her name is Rachel. She hasn't had a particularly easy time of it. She'd like to talk to you, when you feel up to it, if you want."

Bucky turns the thought of that over in his mind. "She's not a threat anymore?"

"I don't think so." Steve sighs. "Wanda is keeping an eye on her anyway, and by eye, I mean Wanda is depressing her powers, and Shuri's built what I can only think of as a Faraday cage for psychics."

Bucky turns this over in his head. "Yeah, I'll see her. Maybe not just yet."

Steve snorts. "Yeah, at least let the doctors give you the all clear first." He reaches out and wraps his hand around Bucky's right fingers, not caring in the slightest about the monitor. "She did a number on you." His voice is not quite steady. "Give yourself a little time to recover."

"Sure, Steve," Bucky says. He takes another sip of water to hide the fact that his pulse has sped up. Steve has not let go of his hand.

Steve watches him closely, so closely that Bucky starts to feel a little self-conscious. "I got something on my face?"

"Nah, just your face." But Steve looks down and blushes a little. His fingers tighten on Bucky's. "I really thought for a minute that I lost you…again. When I came in that room—" He clears his throat. "Your whole face was covered with blood, and you were pretty burned. I thought… I couldn't stand to lose you, Bucky. Not again."

"Steve…" Bucky doesn't know what to say. Instead, he spreads his arms a little wide, and Steve takes the hint, coming in to crush him closer, hugging him so tightly that Bucky's ribs creak. Not that he minds; he gives back as good as he gets, tightening his arms around Steve's so Steve can feel that he's real, that they're both here, that they got through it, again.

"I almost lost you," Steve says again.

"You didn't, though. I'm here. You're here. We made it." Bucky says to Steve's shoulder. The warm press of Steve's body against his, the tight feel of his arms, the familiar, beloved smell of him—Bucky doesn't remember the last time he felt this safe.

Of course, that's when Steve pulls back just a little bit so he can look at Bucky again, and Bucky regrets the sudden distance. "You were so still when I carried you out, just limp over my shoulder, and I kept thinking if we made it out of this, I was going to tell you."

Bucky's heart is suddenly marching double time, a quick hummingbird flutter against his throat. "Tell me what?"

"That I love you," Steve says simply. "I've always loved you. When I think about the rest of my life, there's only one person I want to spend it with, and that's you. And if you don't feel the same way...I'll always, always be your friend. But I didn't want either of us to almost die again before I told you." His eyes dip down, his long lashes a shadow against his cheekbones.

"Steve," Bucky says, breathless. There's a feeling and his chest, joy and uncertainty, swelling his heart, the feelings bigger than his fragile cage of bone and muscle can hold. Without conscious thought, he finds his hands have come to frame Steve's face, one cool metal, the other feeling the breath of Steve's body, the pulse of his blood, the gentle scrape of his stubble against the pad of Bucky's thumb. He leans forward and kisses him, his body deciding what to do before his mind has even really processed it.

Steve lips are soft against his, hesitant, gentle. Steve's eyes flutter closed, but not before Bucky sees an expression of wonder in them.

But that reminds him of the lightning. He pulls back, and it wasn't long enough, it could never be long enough, but he has to keep Steve from making a mistake. 

He can't make himself pull his hand away from Steve's jaw, though. Steve's eyebrows draw together in silent question. But Steve was so brave in opening up to him, and Steve deserves nothing but the truth.

"I love you too," Bucky says. "But I can't understand why you would want to be with me. The things I did—"

"That wasn't you. You didn't decide to do those things. You were made to do them. I could never blame you for what you were forced to do."

"I still did them though. It was these hands. And I remember. I remember all of it. Steve, you're so good that you could take the place of a god—how could I put a tarnish on that?"

Steve looks at him for a second that feels like an eternity. Bucky's throat is tight, his chest aching. It's the right thing to do, he's sure of it, but it feels like his heart is breaking. "You're an idiot," Steve says. "How could you possibly think that you would—you're the best person I've ever known, and you've been saving me my whole life. I know you have the tendency to be a self-sacrificing son of a bitch, but this is ridiculous."

"Don't talk about my mom like that," Bucky says reflexively.  _ "I'm _ self-sacrificing? You're one to talk. I just don't want you to make a mistake with me—there are so many better people out there, Steve. People worth a lot more than me."

"You're doing it again,” Steve says. The look he gives Bucky is some mix of fond and exasperated. "You're trying to sacrifice what you want—what I hope you want—for me, but Bucky…there's no one worth more than you to me. There's no one better in the world."

"You lifted the hammer. I killed dozens of people." Bucky's throat aches, and his jaw is clenched. He doesn't understand why Steve isn't getting it, why Steve doesn't understand what Bucky is trying to tell him; and worse, his gut feels panicky at the thought that maybe Steve does understand.

"Don't you remember what Frigga said? There are a lot of different kinds of worth. Just because Mjolnir decided I qualified for one doesn't mean a thing about the way you embody others. I just—like I said, if you don't want this, it's not the end of the world, and it's certainly not the end of the line. But if you do—" He smiles, a little uncertainly. 

"I want it. I want everything with you," Bucky says. "I just worry that my everything isn't enough for someone who's technically sort of at least a little bit of a god."

"I don't think you need to worry about that," Steve says, his smile deepening. "It's not like I'm going to get another hammer like that anytime soon."

"Do you even need it?" Bucky asks. "You dropped that kid with electricity without it."

Steve stares at him. "Sure I did," he says. "Natasha lent me her widows' bites. She said I might need something a little subtler than those shields."

Bucky closes his eyes for a moment, feeling like a bit of an idiot even though it was a perfectly logical conclusion to draw. "I thought—"

"Even if I had," Steve says, wrapping both of Bucky's hands in his own and tugging him closer, "it still wouldn't make—whatever you're thinking. I'm not better than you, and I never have been. But even if I was a god," Steve says firmly, "I know I'd want to be with you. You're not any less worthy of love than anyone else, and there's no one else in the world I want the way I want you."

Bucky shuts his eyes, lets himself think without the pressure of Steve's gaze, without the sight of everything he's ever wanted most on offer to him. What if he lets himself take what Steve is offering, what he wants so much—what they both want? What if he lets himself be the person that Steve thinks he is? What does he have to lose? He opens his eyes.

"If we do this," he says hoarsely, "you have to promise me that it won't make any difference to us, that even if it doesn't work out, we’ll still be friends. I can't lose you."

Steve's gaze warms, his eyelids creasing with his smile. "You couldn't lose me if you tried." He frowns. "But don't try."

Bucky thinks guiltily of the ways he had tried to make distance between them. He thinks now that that might have been the way to lose him after all, if he had kept doing it. "I won't," he says, and Steve was just joking, but he means it solemnly, like a promise.

"See that you don't," Steve says, and his lips no longer curve, but his eyes are still smiling as he takes Bucky's hands and tugs him closer again. 

Steve kisses him, leaning in, lips pressed gently to lips, a quiet exploration that's more a promise than anything else, until their heads turn a little, and Steve's hands slide around Bucky's shoulders, pressing their bodies closer. Bucky tilts his head, and suddenly their lips slot together perfectly, and it's natural for Bucky to open his mouth, and just as natural for Steve to respond in kind, lips parting, tongues meeting teasingly until suddenly they aren't teasing at all, and it's a deep kiss, a promise of more, the kind of kiss that stirs a flicker of heat that Bucky probably ought not be feeling on a hospital bed, if he could make himself care about that.

He's aware of a faint beeping, more as a background annoyance than anything else until the door swings open and the nurse says, "Mr. Barnes? Your heart rate—oh!"

Steve and Bucky jump apart like teenagers who just got busted by a parent, even though the door is already swinging closed again, and the nurse is probably just as embarrassed as they are.

Steve is smiling like an idiot, and from the ache in his cheeks, Bucky presumes he's smiling just as wide. "Once you're cleared from this hospital room, can I take you out?"

"Yeah," Bucky says. "You can take me out from the room we both share with Sam."

Steve groans, but he's still grinning. "God, Sam is going to be insufferable. He's been telling me that I should just tell you how I feel for literal years." Steve's smile shutters a little bit, a little bit of the shine coming off the joy in his expression. "Even counting the missing years." 

"Steve," Bucky begins, but he doesn't know what to say.

"Look, I don't want you to think that you're the only one with regrets, the only one who thinks he could've done it better." Steve rubs a hand over his face. "There should have been a way to fix all this so you didn't miss all that time."

"You can't dwell on that," Bucky says. "As much as you might want to think about what you could've done differently, or what you should've done, it doesn't help. What we have is what happened, and as long as it got us both here, in the same place again…There are things I'm sad about missing, sure, but I don't regret ending up here again together."

"Yeah, me too." Steve squeezes Bucky's hands. "You just tell me what you want me to do, all right? I want to take you out someplace nice."

"I'm an invalid," Bucky says, even though his headache is dissipating and he feels mostly fine. "Why don't you surprise me?"

"You're a jerk, you know that?" Steve says, but he's smiling again.

"After all this time, you can't tell me that's a surprise." Bucky leans back against the hospital bed, both in a bid to be nonchalant and because he's actually still pretty tired.

"You okay?" Steve says, always sensitive to what Bucky needs.

"Just tired," Bucky says. "Still a little thirsty."

Steve helps him drink, then gets him settled on the thin hospital pillow. Bucky wants to stay awake, wants to keep himself from thinking that this is a dream. But it's okay; there's no need to stay awake like that—they've got time. He falls asleep to that comforting thought.

~o~

Bucky gets released from his hospital bed to find that knowledge of his personal life is apparently a hot commodity, because everyone seems to know that he and Steve are—he doesn't even know what to call it. Dating? Have an understanding? They've just barely agreed to explore whatever this is between them, and already everyone at the compound is delighted, constantly ribbing them about it, or both.

"I didn't realize gossip was in such short supply," Bucky gripes to Wanda as they package up donated linens to disperse to some of the rehomed people. They’ve got notes on what’s supposed to go where and to who, but other than making sure the scanned labels match their list, it’s pretty mindless work. 

She shoots him a smile. "Everyone's excited to have something happy to talk about."

"Not Sam," Bucky mumbles, because Sam has been vocally annoyed at having the two of them as roommates, now that they're a couple. He’s threatened to beat them up if he walks in on any more kissing.

Wanda lifts an eyebrow. "You know that's his way of being affectionate," she says. "He gives you shit because he loves you."

"Explain Natasha then," he says.

She smiles at him fondly. "Natasha's been trying to set Steve up for literal years. She's thrilled that he's finally found someone."

"She's not bothered that it's me?"

"She'd have been shocked if it had been anyone else." Wanda chuckles, a dry little sound. “Any of us would. It's not often that you see devotion like the two of you have."

Bucky shakes his head. "I just can't imagine how any of you can see Captain America with…"  _ A murderer,  _ he wants to say but he doesn't.

But maybe Wanda hears the unsaid words, because the mirth flees her face and she looks at him sternly. "You're not the only one who's done things they wouldn't do now. Things they’d undo if they could. Steve’s a person who’s made mistakes too, a person who loves you, who loves you even though you have regrets. Don't you think it makes all of us happy to see?"

Bucky shakes his head, astonished and—is overwhelmed the right word? Maybe. He hadn't thought that any of them could look at him and see something similar, even though he sometimes saw parallels in their pasts. But of course, Wanda knows exactly the kind of things he's been thinking, and Natasha does too, and Clint, and—maybe he's been a bit of an idiot, thinking that his trauma was all that unique. Sure it's different, and sure it's of longer duration then everybody else, but he's not the only one who's suffered, and he would never look at them and say that they don't deserve love, so why would he say that of himself? Why would he deny that to himself, and to Steve?

And he's not the only person who's done terrible things, and not even the most recent—certainly not the only person who regrets it.

"I think I'm ready to see Rachel," he says.

~o~

Rachel is being kept in a secure room; secure by Shuri's standards. Shuri gives Bucky a long, involved technical explanation of what she's done to keep Rachel from using her powers outside of the room. He doesn't understand most of it, but gets that she’s scattered vibranium wires throughout the walls, in addition to some other things, and Wanda has been checking to make sure nothing gets through, although she told Bucky that Rachel seems to genuinely want to make amends for what she’s done.

Bucky knocks on the door. Rachel looks up and smiles when she sees him, but it's a wary, haunted smile. Wanda presses his hand and nods solemnly. "I'll be watching from out here," she says quietly. "I don't think she'll try anything, but if she does, I'll stop her."

"Thanks," Bucky says. He squeezes her hand again and let's go. Bucky puts in the code that Shuri gave him, lets the retinal scanner scan his eye, and watches the lock pad blink green. 

The door swings open, and Bucky pushes his way in. The room is a very comfortable prison cell, but it's a prison cell nonetheless, and it makes Bucky's teeth itch. There's a bed, a little table and chair, a sofa with a coffee table and another chair near a flatscreen hung on the wall. All of it seems meant to ensure that she can't hurt herself or others, and of course, there's that lock on the door to keep her from leaving. Bucky understands it, but he doesn't like it. It reminds him too much of what his fate could have been. Rachel is sitting on the chair next to the coffee table, her hands nervously twisting in her lap.

"Thank you for coming to see me," she says quietly. Her voice is smaller and lighter than he expects, and she herself looks smaller. Just a kid, really, and one he feels protective of, despite the fact that she attacked him. Or maybe it's not so strange; he thinks that she, too, is someone who has been used against her will to purposes she despises—or at least, that’s what he’s gathered from what Steve told him.

"Of course," he says, and takes a seat on the couch, far enough away, he hopes, that he won't seem threatening—just because she could mentally crush him like an eggshell, she might still feel physically threatened by him.

She tries to smile. "There's no of course about it, not after what I did."

"Sure there is," Bucky says. "You've been in my head—I've done horrible things. My hands are red with blood. I'm in no position to judge you."

"That's different," she says. "You were brainwashed, tortured. There's no comparison at all."

"You're going to tell me that they didn't have some kind of a hold over you?" He lifts an eyebrow, and she looks down. "How did you end up as the Redeemers' miracle worker, anyway?" 

"Miracle worker?" Her brow wrinkles in confusion.

Inexplicably, Bucky feels himself blush. "Well, that's what we've been calling you. We figured that as hard as Applewhite came down on enhanced people, he had to be telling you and himself that you were doing miracles, not magic."

She laughs, but it's not in any way a happy sound. "No, he never told me that." She interlaces her fingers together, and looks up at him. "He always told me I was born wrong, that doing what he told me was the only way to atone for the sin of my existence."

Bucky shudders. It's a full body reaction, and he can't help it. "The man who had me—one of the men who had me—he told me that I was doing good, that I was shaping an age to make the world a better place." He takes a shaky breath. "But he never told me I was wrong just for existing. He might have treated me like a thing, but he never said my existence was a sin. And yours isn't, Rachel, it's not."

"Maybe." Her eyes flick away from his, her gaze dropping down to her folded fingers. "But I did a lot of terrible things. I've been doing a lot of terrible things, for years."

"It's not your fault," he says, as forcefully as he can. "Almost everyone here has got some atrocities in their history. It's not just you, and it's not just me."

"You didn't choose to do it," she says, still not looking up. “They tortured and brainwashed you. They didn't have to do that to me."

"Applewhite," he says. "Tell me how you came to be with him."

"My parents were part of his church—well, my adopted parents. When weird things started happening around me, they took me to him. He told me that there was only one way to cleanse myself of the sin I was born with." She looks up, and her eyes are brimming with tears. "I don't know why I believed him."

Bucky suddenly knows how Steve must feel as he constantly assures him that it wasn't his fault that Hydra made him do those things. "How old were you when the Redeemers got you?"

Rachel hesitates for just a second, her eyes flicking to the floor. "I was eleven. Both my parents got snapped, and I was in a shelter for a little while, and then Reverend Pete found me." She takes a breath, knots her fingers around each other. "He was real nice at first, and I don't think they questioned it too hard—there were so many kids without homes just then, they were happy to place anybody."

Bucky seethes at the thought of Applewhite with his ideas about abominations getting his hands on Rachel. "You were just a kid, and you were grieving and scared, and your whole world had just been turned upside down. You're still a kid. That should he said to you—none of it was true."

"If it wasn't true, then should not have known better? Why did I listen?"

"You were vulnerable, and he took advantage of you. If there's anyone who should be ashamed, it was him. People like that—they think they're entitled to you, but he never was, and it's not your fault that you trusted what he said." He takes a deep breath, then reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder. She feels so small, the bones of her arms so delicate and fragile. "I know you might not be able to believe it, not right away, but I'll keep saying it until you believe it. I don't think there's anybody here who hasn't done some things they wish they could undo, and some were kids who were lied to, just like you.”

A choked sob breaks out of her, and Bucky tightens his grip on her shoulder. If he knew her better, he might pull her into a hug, but he doesn't want to overstep. You should talk with Wanda and Natasha," he says. "I think hearing about their experiences could really help you."

She turns her head toward him, burrowing into his shoulder, and he lets his hand rest on her back, feeling bigger and clumsier than usual.

"Hey," he says, once her sobs have turned to sniffles, "what are your parents' names? The snap is over. They’re back, and I'm sure they're looking for you."

She wipes the back of her hand across her eyes, and gives him a doleful, watery look. "Shuri asked me that too. I can't possibly go back to them, not after the things I've done."

"I promise you," he says, maybe recklessly, "they want you back. They're going to understand that you didn't choose to do those things. They're going to understand that you need help. And if they don't, I'll make them understand. I'll help you."

"You can't know what they're going to think about me," she says, and her voice breaks on the last word.

"No, I don't know, not for sure," he says. "But I can tell you this much—I've done a lot worse for you, and for a lot longer, and the person I thought couldn't possibly believe in me has always proven me wrong. Give them a chance, Rachel."

She holds her breath, then lets it out in a loud sigh. "Scott Summers and Jean Grey."

"I'll help you find them," he says. "I promise."

He leaves her in her lonely cell, promising to come back and see her soon, and when he closes the door behind him, Steve is standing there. There's a one-way window, and he and Rachel had both known they were being observed, but he hadn't thought that it would be Steve.

Steve's eyes are rimmed with red and suspiciously shiny. Bucky bites his lips; he meant everything he said, but he might have said it differently, if he had known Steve was listening. But Steve doesn't say anything, not immediately anyway. He opens his arms in the kind of wordless plea that Bucky doesn't want to refuse, so Bucky steps into them, and let Steve hold him tight.

He's not yet over the miraculous way their bodies fit together, the way the strong shield of Steve's embrace can make him feel so safe, even as he knows exactly how rare and delicate the architecture of Steve's body is. Not fragile, not anymore, but still soft skin over bone, still human even though he has touched the divine. And still, against all odds, opening himself up to Bucky. He might get used to being able to touch Steve this way, but he'll never let himself forget what a gift it is.

"You're something else, Bucky," Steve says. "She's going to be okay."

"It's different," Bucky says, "hearing it from the other side. I don't know how you don't get sick of telling me the same thing over and over again."

Steve laughs, but his eyes are impossibly soft, and impossibly fond. "I don't mind saying it as many times as you need to hear it."

"It helps," Bucky says. "You saying it, but also talking to Rachel…it's really easy for me to see how it's not her fault, and it wasn't Nat's fault, and it wasn't Wanda's fault." He looks down at his hands, the flesh and blood one, and the metal one; different, but both used, now, not just to destroy things, but also to rebuild. The words  _ it wasn't my fault either  _ stick in his throat. He can't quite say it, but he thinks one day he might be able to believe it.

Steve, of course, has been saying it all along. "It wasn't your fault, Buck." He takes Bucky's hands in his own and pulls them up to face level. His fingers are warm against Bucky's as he drops a kiss, first on the metal hand, then on Bucky's right hand, his eyes never leaving Bucky's face. "Every time you've had a choice, you chose to help people, not hurt them."

That's not entirely true, but Bucky is not going to get into an argument with Steve about every bad or selfish thing he's ever done—and Steve's point holds; he'd never have chosen to do the things that Hydra had him do, and he wouldn't really have chosen to join the army, if it'd been up to him. But none of that is what's important now; what's important now is helping Rachel, finding her parents, helping her believe that she's not the sum of what she was made to do, either.

He allows himself a moment to press their clasped hands to his chest, to lean into Steve and kiss him. It feels like so much and not enough. It's not a heated kiss, not right now, more of an assurance that Steve is here for him, here with him, that Steve has his back however he needs him to. And after talking to Rachel, Bucky's really trying to let himself believe that he deserves it.

~o~

By the time they get back to the room they're sharing with Sam, Bucky feels tired but wound up at the same time. Sam's not there when they get there, which is a rare and welcome development—not because Bucky doesn't like spending time with Sam, but because time alone with Steve, in private, is a rare commodity.

They had gone to the office and given the names of Rachel's parents to Maria Hill, who had frowned like she was trying to remember something and promised to get back to them. It feels like a start to Bucky, if only a start, and he hopes they'll be able to find them. Everything’s still in flux, and there's no telling how many people are still unaccounted for, back but not yet in place in their old lives. If Bucky thinks for too long about Rachel's parents, back and confused and maybe only starting to realize that the child they left is now a teenager, with no way of knowing what she's suffered, his eyes get hot and he might actually cry, and that's not how he wants to spend this quiet time together. 

Instead he hooks his fingers through Steve's belt loops and tugs him closer. Steve's pupils flare in response, and he reaches out to drape his arms over Bucky's shoulders. Bucky likes the weight of them, the way Steve's solidity grounds him. Kissing is its own language, Bucky thinks, because the kiss earlier was about comfort, and when he presses his lips to Steve this time, that's not at all what it's about. This time there's heat to it, and he leans into Steve like a sunflower toward the sun and lets the banked fire inside him flare a little hotter. Steve slips his hands from Bucky's shoulders down his back, and deepens the kiss, his tongue gliding over Bucky's lips. Bucky gets his hands under Steve's shirt, his fingers sliding over soft, smooth skin and—

The door swings open.

"Oh, man, get a room," Sam says. Bucky doesn't exactly jump away from Steve, but he does get his hands out from under Steve's clothes in record time, his heart pounding. Sam is a friend and no one is getting arrested for kissing another man in this century, but still. His face feels incredibly hot, and he knows he must be blushing, although hopefully not as red as Steve.

"This is our room," Steve says mildly.

"I know," Sam says. He looks more amused than exasperated, but Bucky still wants to sink into the ground. This is private. "Which is why one of us ought to consider moving out. Or at least y'all could hang a sock on the door or something."

Steve and Bucky look at each other. Bucky hasn't considered moving in with Steve, since they're already living together, but he sure as hell doesn't want to live with anyone else, and it would be deliberately choosing a life together. A big step, maybe, but he suddenly realizes he wants it.

Steve, watching his face intently, says, "Yeah?" and Bucky nods, the feeling inside him so big that if he opens his mouth, he's not sure what might come out.

"Oh no," Sam says, although he's smiling. "You did not just have a conversation with one word and a nod."

Steve shrugs. "Looks like we'll be getting out of your hair."

~o~

The community garden for the Avengers compound is Natasha's brainchild, put in sometime over the last five years, but there are a lot more people to work in it now. Everyone takes a turn pulling weeds, watering, and harvesting. Bucky had helped out some of the farmers in Wakanda in his time in the village, so he's actually got a little useful experience here

He was helping with different crops in Wakanda, but some things are the same everywhere, and it might be a different variety of pepper, but he knows what to do with the plants. In the weeks that Rachel has been in the compound, Wanda and Shuri have come up with a way to let her interact with the community while her powers are still restrained. The device they've come up with looks like a chunky bracelet, and it acts as a hobble on her powers. Bucky believes her when she says that she wants to atone for what she did, but at the same time, she’s used her powers as a weapon, and it's best to have some way to blunt it.

This is the first time that she's joined them in the gardens, and she seems to be enjoying it. Natasha is there with them, talking with Rachel in a low voice as she shows her what to do. Bucky's going through the cucumbers, training the plants along the trellis and tying them up where the vines haven't already since little tendrils out to wind along the metal mesh. He's careful of the flowers that have already fruited, lining them up where they'll be supported and not trail on the ground. It's hot, sweaty work, but he loves to see the garden set to rights, and it's extremely satisfying to eat what they've grown.

After a while, Rachel comes up to him, and he shows her how to twine the vines around the trellis, tying them with strips of soft fabric where the vines aren't clinging on their own. "Did you have a good talk with Natasha?" Bucky asks.

"Yeah," Rachel says. "You're right, seems like just about everybody here has got something bad in their background."

"Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who want to take advantage of people like us," he says, and it's true, even if he was made into what he was, not born into it, like Rachel. "You settling in okay?"

"Yeah," she says. She pulls a yellowed leaf off the bottom of one of the plants. "I like this."

"What, the garden?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says. "It feels good to help grow things. Like, it feels good to be part of something so productive."

He wipes his hands on his thighs, doing nothing more than smearing the dirt around. "You ever held a hammer?"

She looks at him, one eyebrow raised "… No?"

"Want to learn?"

After that, when Bucky goes to help rebuild, Rachel comes with him. She's not that much help, not at first, but Bucky figures he wasn't much use the first time he tried to fix something, either. He starts teaching her what he knows about rebuilding and repair, and it feels good to pass along these skills. And where he can just pound nails flat with his metal hand, he figures she'll be able to do it even easier once that bracelet's off and she can use her powers again. But there's no harm in knowing how to do it with just elbow grease, and it feels good for him too, teaching her a useful skill that has nothing to do with any abilities they have, just the knowledge he gained a lifetime and a century ago.

The weeks turn into months, and while Bucky hopes Maria finds Rachel's parents soon, he's not sorry to have this time with her. The people in the gardens get to know her, and the other people working to rebuild, and they don't know a thing about her past with the Redeemers, and they don't know what the bracelet on her wrist means. They just smile and wave and greet her by name, and are happy to see her as another set of useful hands.

~o~

"It seems like Rachel's making a lot of progress," Steve says. Bucky's just come back from hanging drywall, and telling Steve about how far his assistant has come.

They're in their little room, a bit more spacious now that Sam has moved out into one of the newer buildings. Bucky's in the bathroom, washing his hands, scrubbing plaster out from beneath the nail beds of his right hand and between the plates of his left. "Yeah," he says proudly. She's really come a long way." He turns the water off and dries his hands. "I was thinking she might like to learn carpentry. I found a couple of YouTube channels, figured I could stand to learn a couple of things past the basics too."

He walks out of the bathroom, and Steve grabs his newly clean hands and pulls him in close for a quick kiss. "You're a good teacher."

"She's a smart kid." Bucky chases after Steve for another kiss, then goes to pull a change of clothes from their dresser. "She can learn anything, even from someone like me."

"Buck." Something in Steve's tone makes Bucky turn back and look at him. "What do you mean, someone like you?"

Bucky pauses, considering it's not that he thinks he stupid, because he doesn't; he was always good at math in school, and he had to get better as it at it as a sniper. And he doesn't think that he's a terrible teacher, either—he'd had lots of experience helping his sisters with their homework, and getting Steve up to snuff on the material when he had to miss school because he was sick. "I guess I mean… Someone with a history like mine."

"There's not a thing wrong with your history," Steve says. "It wasn't your fault."

Bucky catches his lower lip and his teeth. "I know that," he says. "I do. I don't always believe it, but I know it. It's just hard to think, when she could be learning from someone like you—"

"Please don't," Steve says firmly. He takes the clean clothes out of Bucky's hands and sets them on the bed, then folds his hands around Bucky's. "You're the best man I know."

"That's objectively not true," Bucky says. "The hammer—"

"You've got to take me off this pedestal you keep putting me on," Steve says.

"Maybe I was talking about Thor," Bucky says, but they both know that he wasn't.

"I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of," Steve says, "I try to do my best, but it's not always enough."

"Steve," Bucky says, because there's nothing in Steve's ledger that compares to his.

Steve shakes his head and meets Bucky's gaze. "The worst thing I did, during those five years that you were gone… When I thought you were dead, and after we couldn't get the stones from Thanos, after we killed him—I gave up."

Bucky looks at him, stunned, and can't help squeezing his hands hard in between his own. "You didn't—"

"I did," Steve says. His eyes are steady and clear, but sad. "Natasha never did—she just kept going, trying to be Nick Fury in a world without him. Even the garden—she was always planning for the future, and I was barely making it from day to day."

"I didn't know," Bucky says, feeling helpless. He hates the thought of Steve, lost and almost alone. He feels the sudden surge of gratitude for Natasha.

"And that's on me," Steve says, "because I didn't tell you, because it seemed like—we're with each other now, so why dwell on it? But you need to know, because every time you had a choice, you chose to keep trying. But me? I gave up."

"And then you came back swinging, as soon as you had a lick of hope." Bucky cups Steve's face in his hand and kisses him. "God, I'm glad you did."

Steve's eyes go soft, and then he's stripping Bucky of his filthy clothes, and pulling him down to the bed.

Bucky gets his hands on Steve in return, and lets himself be drawn down, one imperfect man who loves another.

~o~

Steve's in DC again, and Bucky and Rachel are in the garden when Natasha comes to find them. Rachel's got a basket full of ripe tomatoes, and Natasha lets them add another to it before she pulls Bucky aside.

He takes one look at her face and says, "What is it?"

"Maria found them," Natasha says. "Rachel's parents."

Emotion clogs Bucky's throat, so many that he’s not sure what he's feeling.

"Her parents—are they going to be able to look out for a kid like her? She needs somebody who understands what she's gone through. Are there any therapists that deal with enhanced humans? Fuck, I should've thought of all of this a long time ago. If they're unenhanced parents trying to take care of a girl like her—"

"Breathe, Barnes." Natasha's voice is dry and amused. "They're both enhanced too. In fact, they’re both X-Men, and they both help run that school for enhanced kids up in North Salem."

Bucky's chest unknots a little. "Okay, good. But do they know what she's been through? They can't just expect her to have been okay without them; they can't blame her for what Applewhite—"

"They don't," Natasha says. "They're sorry they weren't there to protect her and help her, of course, but they don't blame her." She looks at him, and Bucky swallows. Applewhite's in jail pending charges, and that's probably for the best. The last person Bucky remembers hating like this is Zola. "I just want…" He trails off. What he really wants is to make sure that Rachel will always be okay and never get hurt, and that's unrealistic, to say the least.

"Look," Natasha says. "I was thinking we could drive her up to North Salem tomorrow. Do you want to come?"

"God, yes," Bucky says, sighing in relief. "She's a tough kid, she doesn't need me—but it'll make me feel better." Natasha's face doesn't change, but he's pretty sure she's laughing at him anyway.

He excuses himself to call Steve, but before he can, his kimoyo bead chimes. “Shuri,” he answers, still walking away from the garden, glad to hear from her. 

“Bucky,” she says, looking up from the little projection at his wrist. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

“I was in the garden, and then I was gonna call Steve. But he can wait. What’s up with you? Anything the Avengers need to know about?”

“No,” she says slyly. “Not this time. But I have a surprise for you. I’m in New York. When can you come see me?” 

He stops and fully looks at her. “Well, as it happens, we found Rachel’s parents, a little ways outside of the city, and I’m taking her to them tomorrow. Is that too soon? I can swing by afterward.” 

“No, that’s perfect,” she says, delighted. “Bring Steve too if you want to. I’ll text you the address.” 

“I can’t wait,” he says, and means it. They arrange the time, he mentions that Natasha and Sam might be with him. When they’re done, he calls Steve, and arranges to meet him there when Steve’s meetings are over instead of at the compound.

~o~

"It's not that far away," Bucky tells Rachel in the car the next day. "You could come visit us. We could come visit you. There could be visiting, is what I'm saying."

Rachel gives him a hesitant smile. "That would be good," she says, and then swallows. "Bucky, I'm so much older than they remember. What if they don't want me anymore because I'm too old?"

Natasha, driving, meets Bucky's eyes in the rearview mirror, and Sam, in the passenger seat, turns to shoot a worried glance over his shoulder.

But this is something, too, that Bucky has personal experience with. "Do you know what I thought, when I saw Steve, after we came back?"

"It's really hot the way he's lifting that hammer?" Sam mutters under his breath. Bucky doesn't dignify that with a response.

"I was just so happy to see him, I didn't care how much time passed. When I thought about it later, I was sad that I had missed those years, but…being happy to see him counted for so much more than everything else. It's not that it didn't matter, it's that having him there was more important. I'm sure your parents will feel the same way. And if they don't... call me, and I'll come take you back home." 

Rachel grabs his hand tightly when they get there, but the reunion with her parents is all the hugs and happy tears he could have hoped for. He and Sam and Natasha watch from a distance as the tall woman with hair as red as Rachel's and a man in the red sunglasses pull her into a tight embrace.

"We really will help her, you know," a voice says to the side. Bucky turns, and there's a bald man in a wheelchair approaching them. "Charles Xavier," the man says. "I run the school for gifted youth. And you must be Sergeant Barnes."

It feels strange to be addressed that way, but Bucky guesses Maria might've said something to Rachel's parents. "Please, call me Bucky." He extends his right hand, leaving the other in his pocket. Xavier shakes it, his eyes seeming to peer much further into Bucky's soul than he'd like.

"She's in good hands here," Xavier says. “She's not the first child to come here with troubles in her past."

Bucky thinks about what he and Rachel had talked about—the way there were always going to be someone trying to take advantage of people with enhanced abilities. "No, I'm sure she's not." They chat with Xavier a while longer, then after tearful goodbyes with Rachel, and promises to visit soon, they leave.

Bucky's mostly silent on the way to the city; he's looking forward to seeing Steve and Shuri, but mostly he can't stop thinking about the other kids like Rachel, like Wanda, out there being used and possibly abused by unscrupulous people. He lets Sam and Natasha's conversation washed over him, turning the germ of an idea over inside his head.

A few hours later, they’re at the address Shuri gave them, a block of old warehouses that's being converted to something else; Bucky has an inkling of what, but he just waits for Shuri to tell them what she's up to. Steve's already there with her, and after they all say hello, he comes up to Bucky and rests a gentle hand at the small of his back, more of a question than a show of possessiveness, checking to see if Bucky's all right after telling Rachel goodbye. Bucky reaches behind his back and squeezes Steve's fingers, letting him know as best he can that he's somewhere in the vicinity of okay.

"It'll be ready in a month, two months at the most." She takes in their expressions and adds, "Guess what it is?"

"Another center like the one in Oakland," Bucky offers, fairly sure that he's correct.

"Yes! And we broke ground on one in Atlanta last week." Shuri grins. "This will be an opportunity to do some good here."

"I had another thought that I'd like to get your opinion on," Bucky says. Shuri shoots him a look, and so do Steve, Sam, and Natasha. "You met Rachel, right?"

"The last time I was at the compound, yes." Shuri looks at him, her eyes bright and head tilted at the angle that always makes him think of Becca. He can't help but contrast those bright eyes and open curiosity to Rachel when he first saw her, hunched over and miserable.

"There are probably a lot more young people like her out there, kids with powers, being taken advantage of. We've seen it so often—people who just want to use anyone with an ability. Kids are especially vulnerable, so I thought maybe we ought to take some of our resources and devote them to looking for those kids."

Shuri's smile lights up her face. "It's a good thought."

"Maybe it could be a joint Wakanda-Avengers project," Bucky says. "Only instead of waiting for avenging, we could try to do a little preventing."

"I like it," Shuri says. "I'll discuss it with my brother. Maybe talk to some of your people and see if we can get some ideas on how to find these people before they get into trouble."

"He's always had a talent for finding trouble." Steve's hand tightens on the small of Bucky's back, and when Bucky glances over at him, his smile lights up his face.

There will be a lot of details to hammer out, he's certain of that; but it's the right thing to do, both for the sake of the people out there who need their help, and because it seems like a better way to go about it then waiting for a situation to blow up.

They tour the compound, and Shuri is all flashing smiles and fast hand movements as she points toward the areas that will be set up as schools, as medical stations, as science labs, and the places that will serve as housing for staff and potentially students. There's still a lot of construction to be done, but as she says it, Bucky can see it.

That night, Steve and Bucky stay in a hotel not far from the future Wakandan outreach center. They had a long, leisurely dinner with Shuri, T'Challa, Sam, and Nat, and while a lot of it was bouncing ideas around about Bucky's potential project and the outreach center, a lot of it was just conversation between friends, and more than once, Bucky had looked at Steve and seen Steve's evident enjoyment of having all these people together, the people he'd given up on seeing ever again, and now had back. That as much as the conversation had made dinner truly enjoyable for Bucky; seeing Steve's happiness written so clearly on his face made Bucky's chest tight, in the best way, so full of emotion that he felt it in his sternum.

Bucky lets himself flop back onto the king size bed. "Tired?" Steve says from the bathroom, sounding amused.

"Maybe a little," Bucky says. "But I bet I'd wake up if you got in bed with me."

Steve finishes brushing his teeth. Bucky hears him rinse his mouth out from the bathroom, and then Steve saunters in and does as instructed. Bucky reaches up for him to pull him down onto the bed, eager, but also lazy, and fully intending to make Steve do all the work.

But he only gets his as far as sliding his hands up under Steve’s (very tight) t-shirt before Steve flips him over and pins him with his enormous body.

"Unfair," Bucky complains, although he's not actually upset about this development.

Steve ducks down and kisses him, then pulls back a little. Bucky presses up, trying to chase Steve's mouth, but Steve just smiles down at him, eyes sparkling. Bucky resigns himself to having to wait to hear whatever's on Steve's mind before he gets his hands back on him. "Spit it out," Bucky advises.

"What would you think about moving back to New York?" Steve says, still smiling.

Bucky gapes at him for a moment. It's probably not his most attractive expression. "But what about our work at the compound. What about Avenging?"

Steve rubs a thumb over Bucky's jaw. "The compound was never meant to be a permanent home; just what we could rebuild after Thanos. It's close enough that we could get there pretty fast if they needed us for a mission, anyway."

Bucky thinks for a moment. The work that he's been doing to rebuild and in the garden is work that could be done by just about anybody, and even a casual glance at the areas around the restaurant or the future Wakandan outreach center or their hotel shows that there's plenty of work to be done here, too. "Why?" he asks finally.

"I thought—this way you’d be close to the outreach center, and that would probably help for your project with Shuri. It'd be easier to catch a flight to DC for meetings—"

"It's further away than Jersey," Bucky says, unable to stop himself.

Steve snorts quietly and nudges him just close enough to his armpit that the threat of tickling is there. "I miss living in the city," Steve says. He glances down and then up again, meeting Bucky's gaze, the blue of his eyes framed by his thick lashes. "I don't want us to live in a dorm room forever, Buck, and when I picture us making a home, it's here."

For such a simple statement, there's so much of it that hits Bucky right in the gut: that Steve was thinking about the future with him, making a home with him, a life together. And it's what they've been doing, building their life together, but the distance from the work they've been doing at the compound will give them a little more space for the two of them.

"Wherever you are is home to me," Bucky tells him, "but God, I want that too. A place that's just for you and me."

Steve ducks down and kisses him quickly. Bucky can feel his smile against his lips. "You mean it? We can move in together?"

"Rogers, you walnut, we already live together, or did you forget?" Bucky's smiling too, can feel how big and goofy his grin must be, but he couldn't make it smaller if he wanted to, and he doesn't.

"We can get a house, or an apartment, I don't care," Steve says. "You can show me how to fix it up, Rachel can grade me on my efforts when she comes to visit."

The thought of it grips Bucky, and he can almost see it, a place with wooden floorboards polish to shine, Steve sketchbook on a table, extra chairs for their friends to come visit, but more than anything a place for both of them to come back to. "Let's do it," he says, and pulls Steve back down where he can get his hands and mouth on him.

He knows that everything they've taken on will be a lot of work, but it was never going to be easy setting the world to rights. But when he thinks of the future, what he thinks of is a life spent rebuilding, a life spent rescuing, a life spent helping places and people to grow; and most of all, he thinks of Steve at his side, the two of them facing whatever challenges come next together. And that, more than anything, is worth it.

~o~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I like to think that in this little AU, Bucky finds RJ and basically most of the New Mutants, and Steve is like "how did we end up in charge of all these moody teenagers?" but secretly he loves it because Bucky is so good with all of them, and Steve has a bit of a protecting people thing too. And the New York Wakandan outreach has an entire urban garden and Bucky teaches a bunch of kids how to weed and stake tomatoes in between community outreach. 
> 
> I'm on twitter and tumblr as @deisderium, but twitter is where i'm up to the most nonsense. <3


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